RSS Tutorial

Finding Feeds Using Search

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Summary

After you have an RSS feed reader and know how to subscribe to RSS feeds, how do you find feeds?

You can find RSS feeds using Search engines.

• The major search engines have some capability for RSS Feed Search.
• Blog search engines have significant overlap with RSS Feeds, and can be used to find many RSS feeds.
• RSS feed searches are now available and take various approaches.

Detail

Different search engines mean different things when they do RSS feed search.

Refer to the Venn diagram above:

• Some search engines search for blogs, which find lots of RSS Feeds but not all.
  The search results would include the yellow and green.
• Some search for Blogs with feeds, which does not find all the RSS feeds.
  The search results would include the green.
• Some search for just RSS feeds.
  The search results would include the green and orange.

Major Search Engines

Microsoft Search now called Bing.

MSN search has two new search commands to limit searches to feeds.

Feed:

Example feed:rss tutorial
Will return any RSS feed files that contains the query terms "rss tutorial".

Hasfeed:

Example hasfeed:rss tutorial
Will return any website or blog that contains the query term "rss tutorial" and has an associated RSS feed file.

MSN Search Gains New Feed Searching Commands - an article about the new MSN search commands.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search searches blogs that have feeds.

Google Blog Search FAQ - to see the Google Frequently Asked Questions about the Google blog search.  One is below.

To refer to the chart above, the Google blog search does not include all blogs or all feeds. It is a search for blogs with feeds, which is the green part of the chart.

Yahoo! Search Engine Advanced

In the Yahoo advanced search, there is an option to restrict the search to RSS/XML feeds. The File format option has a drop down menu that includes

The results will be noted as follows:
Your search was restricted to "RSS/XML (.xml)".

Blog Search Engines

There is enough overlap of blog and RSS feeds to consider using Blog searches to find RSS feeds.

Resources:

Searching for Blogs - Blog search sources.

Prominent Blog Searches

• Technorati lets you search sites that update with extreme frequency.
• Technorati results are individual posts.
• Technorati results are listed newest to oldest, and claim the newest might be a few minutes old.

Mark Cuban is a successful entrepreneur and the owner of the Mavericks, which is the National Basketball Association team in Dallas, Texas. Mark Cuban wants to read anything in a blog or feed that people write about the Mavericks. Cuban started this blog / feed search because he could not find anything that he liked.

Blog Search engines are useful when searching for RSS Feeds, but only partially so. To refer to the graph at the top of the page, they usually are searching yellow + green.

RSS Search Engines

RSS Feed search engines seem somewhat volatile.  Here today: gone tomorrow. 

RSS Compendium - RSS search - An excellent resource for finding RSS Feed Search Engines.