Welcome to the RSS Search Engine Formerly Known as Roogle -- I Give you Feedster !

Well I've got two very good pieces of news for today.  The first one is the new name: feedster.com.  The site is up and working.  Feel free to stop on by.

Logo help from Etation Media and I know about the swoosh...

The Name

I know we're going to get comments on the name.  Its ok folks.  A name is a name and this one is short (8 chars), .com and has at least something to do with the concept (RSS is a feed after all) but unique enough to be brandable.  Also at this point I think everyone would rather have us making you the best possible RSS search engine NOT doing the corporate naming exercise.  I've done those and they aren't pretty.

New Feature

Search results are now subscribable via RSS.  Lets say you want see daily results for a search on 'feedster' then just search for that on Feedster and then subscribe to the RSS icon at the bottom of the page.  Brent from Net News Wire pushed me on this and helped me understand the <SOURCE> element which is now supported.  Thanks Brent!  I also tested this in AmphetaDesk which worked like a champ.

Known Issues

Here are a couple of things:

• I'm not 100% certain if this RSS of search queries works correctly in Radio.  I've had problems but it could be me.  Or it could be content encoding on RSS feeds that tell me they are in English when they're really in Russian.  Until we get language detection in place, this is probably going to be an issue.  Working on it.
• The CSS tabs look horrible at least on my OSX box.  Anyone have a thought?  They work on IE 5.5 (pc), IE 6 (pc), Opera 7, Konqueror (more on that next post) and Mozilla.

If You Find a Problem

We could use the help getting any issues addressed.  There is a mechanism for reporting issues (and easily capturing the page on which the problem exists).   Let's say you do a search and notice that your blog title isn't correct (as they aren't for all too many blogs; mostly my bad).  Click on the Report Problem link and just tell us about it.  Since query results can change, you might want to paste in the blog's url.  I'll look into adding that at the result list element level but no promises since that would mean making an icon.

9:16:27 PM

categories: Radio Fun

 

Search Tool Added Through Lilia Efimova .... Search Tool Added
Through Lilia Efimova I found Micah Alpern's microblogosphere search tool (go see Micah's weblog).

As a search tool to search my own blog, and the ones I read, was something I already had on my wishlist of improvements for my blog, I've imeddiately added it on the left hand side, directly below the blogroll.

Great work Micah! [Ton's Interdependent thoughts]

Very cool stuff. Check out my home page to see the resulting search box to see it in action.

You can now from one place search Google, my blog (a Google search limited to my site) or a blog search that searches across all sites whose RSS feeds I read. (Note: you'll need a Google API key to make this work on your own site; visit the Google API site for more info.) This is incredibly valuable - and just one more step down the path to the semantic web.

The end result? You can now run searches that effectively say - "show my everything about topic (X) that my community has said".

Whoa.