Blog category browsing sucks
Today I was looking for a blog post I made about OPML, and my search queries weren’t doing much as I couldn’t remember the terms I used in my blog post, so I decided to browse my OPML blog category.
I eventually found my post but it took a while because it was from over 6 months ago, and I post alot about OPML.
Now I can assign multiple categories to a blog post which is great, but I’d like to capitalise on this and do boolean searches for blog categories.
If a post has been assigned the categories “blog”, “opml”…being able to add these together and see posts that only have these 2 categories would help a great deal…this is nothing new.
A way around this is to bookmark every post in Simpy, why, because Simpy has great browse and search features:
Show me posts that are both in these categories…opml AND blog
Show me posts that are in either of these categories…opml OR blog
Show me posts that are in the category “opml”, if any of these posts are also in the category “blog”, then I don’t want to see them…opml NOT blog
What I’ve mentioned above is not searching, it’s just browsing posts in different ways, but you can also search this way, and limit it to different fields, or even combine fields.
eg.
Search for the term “feed” in the OPML category
Search for the term “feed OR rss” in the OPML category
etc…
Search for the term “feed OR rss” in the title field of any of my blog posts.
Search for the term “feed OR rss” in the comments field of any of my blog posts.
Search for the term “feed” in the title in any of my blog posts within the OPML category
Search for the term “feed” in the title in any of my blog posts within the OPML category and the blog category
Search for the term “feed” in the title in any of my blog posts and search for the term “feed” anywhere in the OPML category.
Simpy also has a search box to embed in your blog so you can search with these operators, by the way it also searches full-text, and results can be based on latest, popularity, or relevancy.
Doh
Actually, since Technorati Tags indexes my blog categories I could just add the tags “blogs+opml” at my user level, see here.
Anyway I still think blog searching is primitive…I really want to browse and search my blog the way Simpy would enable, and this will only happen if I bookmark all my posts which is a hassle.
Imagine if you could do full boolean and fielded searching across the whole blogosphere, infact Technorati does have boolean and phrase searching (but not for the tag search section), and what about fielded searching
…sure you can browse blog categories, but you can’t search within, or you can’t search just blog titles.
[ADDED: I forgot about Blogdigger, check this out, I can see all my blog posts within the “opml” category, but not the “folksonomy” category, and at the same time just display the posts with the term “feed”.
feed blogID:239657 subject:opml NOT folksonomy
You can sort it by date or relevancy, and even grab a feed.]
[ADDED 22/05/06: Correction to my Blogdigger search string:
feed blogID:239657 subject:opml -subject:folksonomy
…another way way of equating this is
feed blogID:239657 subject:(OPML -folksonomy)
Thanks for the correction Greg.]
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Glad to be of service.
A small correction on your query:
it should end with
subject:(OPML -folksonomy)
or
subject:opml -subject:folksonomy
The syntax you are using excludes posts with folksonomy anywhere in the title, body or categories.
Thanks again!
Comment by Greg Gershman — May 22, 2006 @ 2:22 am