Feedster Updates Its Search Engine

Syntax wonks will have a field day; blog search engine Feedster (http://www.feedster.com) has updated its search engine to include a jaw-dropping array of syntaxes and search options. You can get a good idea of the overview at http://www.feedster.com/help/. Note that this is still a work in progress; not all syntaxes are functional yet.

Field searching is one of the new options for Feedster. Fields include title, description, language, etc. The syntax is enacted with an equal sign; searching for title=google will find entries with Google in the title, language=de will find German-language documents, etc. Of course you can mix them -- title=google language=de is a valid search.

(We Interrupt Your Feedster Writeup to Bring You A THOUGHT: How can Feedster offer these kinds of searches? Because Feedster indexes RSS files. RSS is an XML format. (Those of you who aren't very computer-savvy, please don't run away screaming at all these initials.) RSS has many defined fields -- with newer versions of RSS you (or an indexing program) can easily look at a page and say "THESE are the item titles, and THESE are the dates each one was published, and THIS is the actual content," etc etc. You can't do that with HTML; you can look at an HTML page and say, "This is the URL, this is the title, this is the body content," and not much more than that. RSS files allow for more precise searching because the content of RSS is much more precisely defined.

Why should you care? Because Feedster's field searches, here, provide the merest taste of what search engines could be like when they begin indexing more XML and less HTML. Get excited! And now back to our regularly scheduled Feedster writeup, already in progress...)

... until the name Maudling is almost totally obscured. In addition to the field searches, Feedster also allows a variety of search operators including a stemming operator (*), NEAR searches, and a typo function (which will search for your target word, misspelled.) Believe me, I'm just scratching the surface. You need to check out the advanced search help pages yourself. One more thing. When you run a search on Feedster check out the box on the bottom of the first page of results. You'll see a breakdown of how your search query was accepted, and how many results you got. Very handy for when you're trying to fine-tune your search.

Posted to Search Engines-Feedster