There seems to be no lack of entrepreneurs willing to take a crack at developing a new search engine – even if it means going to head to head with Google. Whether it’s Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Cuil or Blekko, there is no lack of search start-ups.

What’s puzzling about this search landscape is the lack of start-ups focused on blog comments. Sure, there’s BackType but it seems to be a lonely voice in the woods. In doing some research on comment search engines, it’s surprising to see so few options.

The question is why the dearth of comment search engines when there are dozens of general search engines, search engines focused on verticals such as travel, and search engines for Twitter?

Sure, there are social media monitoring and analytics services such as Sysomos that can show blog comments but there doesn’t appear to be search engines that simply focus on comments.

Is this an opportunity waiting for someone to capture, or are comments not interesting enough to warrant someone developing a search engine?

Who knows, it may be there’s no viable business model around comment search. But you still have to believe that in this you-can-build-it-so-built-it online landscape that now exists, there’s a smart person who would be willing to build a kick-ass comment search engine just for fun.

More: Speaking of comments, Mitch Joel has a post looking at whether or not comments should be offered as an option on a blog.