j's scratchpad

First, I should say that Feedster has many cool features. I haven’t had time to really play with the search engine since its update, but today, I grabbed a few minutes to do a quick and dirty search just to make sure my photo isn’t in the search results. (Thank goodness!)

Each result has a link on the side that displays other posts from the source on that day. For blogs like mine that can have multiple entries for any particular date, that feature is quite nice.

Imagine if a news search engine, like Google News, or a database had a similar feature: get other items published on this day. It could be incredily useful, especially for establishing context or finding related materials. On days of big events, for example, there may be several articles in a publication or on a Web site about that event. A database or Web search might only find one of those articles. Being able to click a button to retrieve all of them would be very handy.

What about the ability to search for posts on a specific date? I tried doing that, but it didn’t work as I expected it to. In order for Feedster to allow users to view other posts from a source on the same day, it must use some kind of date information.

Come to think of it, it should have at least retrieved posts using the dates as keywords. The search engine must not like punctuation. I tried to find the list of 865 stop words (yes, some nerds like me actually refer to those lists) and some information about how to search, but couldn’t find them at first. The Help link at the bottom of the page goes to a bunch of corporate information, which is fascinating reading, but it doesn’t help me figure out whether I can use quotes in the search box. If you click on More above the search box, then Help on the next screen, you can get to a page about using the search engine.

Another thing that would be handy is an explanation of the icons. Scott Johnson explained some of them to me at a blog group meeting. Some of the ones I don’t know aren’t intuitive to me. The newspaper icon is great because they’re using it to mark news sources that come from real news organizations. A popular news search engine I use daily includes sources that aren’t from news organizations in its search results. I often spend five to fifteen minutes trying to figure out if a Web page in the search results is from an actual legitimate news organization or if it’s some guy’s personal Web site that the search engine thinks is news. (Addendum 7/28: There is now a page explaining the icons.)

I like the “Explain Search” link at the top. It gives the technical details of the search. Sometimes, though, it seems to trigger a second search or maybe it just doesn’t work well when there are quotes in the search box.

The who-links-to-this-blog search is a nice addition. I was playing on Technorati earlier today and had better results, well, actually, results there. Since the two services might use different parameters to find who links to what, the results might be completely accurate while they both show different results. A lot of the results in Technorati are from people having this blog on their blog roll. If Feedster only searches feeds, the database may not contain information about people’s navbar links.

I e-mailed the Feedster folks about some of the problems I mention in this post.

Aside: Wow! For once, not using Internet Explorer 5 gets me somewhere.

What was that about a penguin and a rabbit? Three RSS feeds walk into a bar and it was really funny ’cause the last one saw the first two do it. (If that doesn’t make sense, just keep thinking about it. It’ll be funny eventually. Maybe.)

Addendum 7/17: The ResourceShelf, which tracks search engines better than I ever will, is also writing about Feedster. Here’s a post about their e-mail alert service returning as promised.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2004 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.