Search rollers and more
The latest in web 2.0 search is creating your own list of places to search, and even included it as a search box on a website.
This is a great idea as you can create mini topic search engines, or even a search engine based on your blogroll (Reading List), etc…
The best of these is Rollyo, and it even provides a sharing environment, where you can share and discover mini search engines.
NOTE: The first place that I noticed this type of service was at Gigablast, but it is no way versatile in the web 2.0 way as Rollyo.
Rollyo searches in the HTML of websites, but there are some others like ScoopGo that search in the RSS version of websites.
I guess the various Public RSS Readers such as Kinja, Feed Collectors, Blogdigger Groups, MySyndicaat, Ziki, etc…allow you to search within a bunch of sites (your feedset)
What I want is for my mini search engine to subscribe to my OPML, whenever I add/delete a feed in my Reading List, this will be reflected in my mini search engine…see OPML clones and pinging, and more.
NOTE: In regards to Rollyo, it would be whenever you add/delete a homepage link in your OPML
This way all I have to do is add a feed to my Reading List and other services that use I my Reading List OPML in would automatically be updated.
Rollyo has met me half way, if I add a feed to my Reading List, I can go to the homepage of that feed and click the Rollyo bookmarklet to add that website to my mini search engine.
It’s still a manual process, I want my Reading List OPML to be the control panel, I just want to make the change once…at the moment I have uploaded my Reading List in so many services that I forget, all these services have an outdated version of my Reading List, eg. SYO.
Another awesome addition to the Rollyo toolkit is the Rollbar bookmarklet, this allows you to site search any website you are viewing…up until now I have been using the Google Toobar site search feature. This is the same bar the lets you search your searchrolls from anywhere or even add sites to your searchrolls…see more at TechCrunch.
The latest additions in the search roll market are Yahoo! Search Builder and Searchfeedr.
Tony Hirst mentions Yahoo! Search Builder allows you to add in a set of keywords to further narrow the search, this is the tuning idea that Swicki offer.
Also as Tony mentions none offer searching the full-text of links on a given page, he built it himself.
This idea is further implemented in miniSearch, but this is limited to websites bookmarked in del.icio.us…also see deliSearch.
The idea here is to enter a URL, and search for a term in all the URL’s listed in that URL, example, the URL is a del.icio.us tag, and you are going to search for a term in the full-text of all the URL’s listed in that del.icio.us tag.
Tony’s latest Searchfeedr does a similar thing but for any feed URL. That is, enter a feed URL, and it will search the full-text in all the links listed in this feed.
My idea was to take this to the obvious level, list a bunch of links and then wrap them in OPML, then enter the URL of this OPML in a search box, and enter your search term, and submit…see Meta-search via an OPML URL?
Briefy this is searching a bunch of URL’s via one URL…the power of this is if you have OPML inclusions in your OPML…the extreme would be searching the full-text of a directory all packed into one URL (OPML flavoured).
More
Yahoo! Site Explorer has also updated.
In this post (scroll to end) I was trying to work out a way to find in which blog post of mine I pointed to a particular website.
Problem doing a link search at a blog engine is that if the website I pointed to is very common then I will have to find my post in the plethora of hits.
You may say just remember the name of the label you wrapped the hyperlink in and site search that term, but perhaps the label was - see more.
Perhaps I can look at the trackbacks of that blog post to find my post…but just say I didn’t use trackback.
So the issue is, I am viewing a blog post, and I know I have pointed to this blog post in one of my posts, but which one, how do I find this particular blog post of mine?
Is there a way I can limit a link search to just my blog, ie. do a link search at Technorati for a particular blog post but just limit the results to my blog?
You up for it Tony?
Actually what if I did a link search at Google Blog Search and add a inblogurl term.
Example
I come across this post http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/10/searchfox-to-shut-down…and I know I have blogged about it before.
How do I find my post that points to this URL?
1. I look in the trackbacks of that post to see if I explicitly pointed to it
2. I do a site search on my blog for searchfox, but none of these posts of mine point to the URL in question.
3. Next option is to do a link search for the URL in question.
There it is I found it…but just say the results were over a 1000 hits, how would I find my post amongst these.
I tried this - library clips link:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/10/searchfox-to-shut-down…didn’t work.
I tried this - inblogurl:libraryclips link:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/10/searchfox-to-shut-down…didn’t work.
If these last 2 searches worked, this would be an easy way to find my blog post.
I’m sure there is an easy way to link search and limit the results to one blog, or limit the results to a feed set OPML.
What I do like about Yahoo! Site Explorer is that you can do a link search for one of your blog posts (inlinks), and exclude results from your domain…this excludes other posts from your blog that point to your blog post.
I was hoping Y!SE could do a link search on a URL, and limit results within another URL.
Related:
byoms : search via IM
OPML Lists : topic search engine
[ADDED: See comment below on how you can use Altavista to use the inurl and link syntax in the same query…this solves my problem…thanks Tony.]
[ADDED 09/01/07: Google CSE and dynamic OPML]
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John-
“I come across this post http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/10/searchfox-to-shut-down…and I know I have blogged about it before.
How do I find my post that points to this URL?”
You were on the right track, but didn’t look Beyond Google…
AltaVista, for example, will let you search by link: limiter and other terms (e.g.. url: or title:):
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.techcrunch.com%2F2006%2F01%2F10%2Fsearchfox-to-shut-down+url%3Alibraryclips.blogsome.com&kgs=1&kls=0
Re: want to feed an OPML file into searchfeedr - I KNEW you were going to say that!
However, all my tools are made up of half-hout to evening session hacks, with the intention that everything can be done client side (in the browser). To consume an OPML feed means loading all the separate feeds, pulling out their links, removing duplicates, and then using these to feed the search. The Yahoo query that searchfeedr builds is effectively limited by yahoo to the number of sites that can be searched over, so if an opml file had several rss feeds, each of which had several links, a lot of them wouldn’t get fed to yahoo anyway.
My thought for using OPML wsa slightly different - each feed in the OPML bundle could just define a differently limited search topic, with a link for each search topic that takes the search query term and runs it against a different searchfeed.
tony
Comment by Tony Hirst — August 10, 2006 @ 10:24 am
Altavista to the rescue…awesome Tony, I’m glad I put it out there…in future perhaps I could use Otavo, FAQQLY, etc…for this type of thing, but the blogosphere works for me.
re: search via OPML URL
Just to clarify what I meant was in a service like Blogdigger groups I enter eg. 10 feeds, and I can search across these 10 feeds in the one go.
In Rollyo you can do this across 10 homepage URL’s.
Anyway…now your Blogdigger groups has an OPML URL, is there are service where I can take this OPML and do the same kind of search.
Example, at the moment I can’t search across all my feeds (OPML) in my Rojo RSS Reader, I could import my Rojo OPML into Blogdigger Groups so I can search across all my feeds, but this is just an aspect of Blogdigger Groups, BDG’s is a Public RSS Reader, and I may not want to go to this trouble to just search across my OPML.
So I’m looking for a simple search service (similar to Rollyo, perhaps ScoopGo), where I can enter my OPML URL in one box, and a search term in another box, and submit.
All this will do is search across eg. 10 feeds at the same time, just like Rollyo searches across multiple sites at the same time.
The power of this is that imagine everyone of those 10 feeds was a spliced feed (eg. 25 feeds into one), then you will be actually searching across 250 sites.
NOTE: My OPML doesn’t have to be a Reading List, just say I used an OPML outliner like OPML Workstation to create an OPML of my favourite blog homepages (not feeds)…and I update this all the time.
I’d like to enter this OPML URL at a service and search for a term.
This other issue is when I join a service, eg. Rollyo, I’d like to get my Rollyo to subscribe to this OPML.
re: Your slightly different idea
“each feed in the OPML bundle could just define a differently limited search topic”
Do you mean that each feed in your OPML could represent a topic, perhaps if you had 10 feeds, each feed could be a search feed for a term (this is your topic), or perhaps every feed is a spliced feed (combine 10 or so feeds of your favourite topic into one feed).
But what’s this part mean:
“with a link for each search topic that takes the search query term and runs it against a different searchfeed.”
More
It seems OPML search (http://www.opmlsearch.com) could do what I’m requesting (whether the OPML contains links or feeds).
Enter your OPML in one box, and enter a search term in another box…at the moment I’m getting errors, but I have have the feeling (from a recollection of an earlier convesation with Bela) that this doesn’t search full-text, it will just search for that term in the fields from each node of your OPML…I’m not too sure about this.
Comment by Johnt — August 11, 2006 @ 2:40 am
Blogbar : search your outlink sources
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/11/11/blogbar-search-your-outlink-sources/
Now you can browse to a webpage and see if you have linked to it in one of your past blog posts
Comment by Johnt — November 11, 2007 @ 4:27 pm