Meta-search via an OPML URL?
A while back I posted about searching within a set of sites or feeds via an OPML URL…the main sites I was talking about were Rollyo, Swicki, and ScoopGo.
Firstly it would be great if you could import an OPML file or URL into these services, batch loading is way quicker than manually doing it.
Even better, what about if you could just enter the OPML URL, and the service would search the sites within the OPML URL…this way if you add/deleted any sites from your OPML URL it would be reflected in, eg Rollyo, you wouldn’t have to go to Rollyo and update the changes as it would happen automatically.
So, with Rollyo or Swicki you could make an OPML URL at OPML Workstation, this OPML would contain HTML homepages.
Then just import this OPML URL into Rollyo or Swicki and you could search all these sites via the one URL
…is this possible?
Do just the same for ScoopGo, but the items in the OPML URL would be feeds, not HTML homepages.
Now just say your OPML URL contains OPML Inclusions
Eg. you have made one OPML URL that contains HTML homepages, then you see 2 of your friends have also made one each, so you decide to make a new mother OPML URL that contains as items, all 3 of these OPML URL’s…so now Rollyo can search 3 lots of OPML URL’s (each containing a number of homepages) via the mother OPML URL.
What about Bitty Browser (a mini search browser for your blogs sidebar).
You can set the homepage to whatever you like, your favourite web page, favourite feed, favourite OPML URL, etc…
Since it also has a search feature, I wonder if you could search your Bitty Browser homepage?
If your homepage is a spliced feed it would search all those feeds/blogs in the one search, if it was an OPML URL that contained feeds or HTML pages then it would do a similar thing, if it was an OPML URL that contained other OPML URL’s, then it would search all the feeds/sites within each OPML URL, all at once.
I think this is an opportunity for a new type of meta-search, it’s like saying “see all the websites at this webpage, now can you search within them all for my search term”.
The only attempt of this I have seen is miniSearch, from my post:
“…instead of searching a bunch of URL’s at the same time, like Rollyo, it is searching one URL that’s already pointing to a bunch of sites. “
Unlike Furl, del.icio.us doesn’t yet cache its webpages, so an alternative is to enter one of your del.icio.us tags into miniSearch, and set it to Web Pages, this will now search the full-text of every webpage within that del.icio.us tag.
Now if miniSearch would accept OPML URL’s then we are in business
…see Search in an OPML (since Feedster changed their design I don’t see the option to search within an OPML URL, that’s a pity because this was quite unique).
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