How to Use Feedster's Trusted Search Feature. This post is dedicated to Ross Mayfield from Social Text. Ross was talking to me last night about Micah Alpern's "Trusted Search" concept which has actually been in Feedster for some time but is not widely used.

The idea here is that I don't want to search everything in Feedster but just the blogs I read i.e. the ones I search. This relies on you having an OPML file of the blogs that you read. This is produced by some but not all news aggregators. For example Radio produces one that is always stored in the location /blog/gems/mySubscriptions.opml. Feedster has the ability to read your opml file from any URL and then use to restrict your search.

Here's how to do this:

1. Go to Feedster's Advanced Search page
2. In the OPML field add the url to your OPML. Here's the url to Ross' OPML: http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/gems/mySubscriptions.opml
3. In the Search field add what you want to find (use wiki for example).
4. Here's the result (305 results).
5. If you didn't use the OPML then here's the result (5,000+ hits)

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