Search Engine for OPML Files

OPML stands for "Outline Processor Markup Language" and is an XML format for outlines. However its more common use is as a file format for lists of RSS feeds. A variety of RSS feed readers at least import and often export OPML files. You can read more about OPML at Wikipedia.

That background bit is to give you a little more information before I write up OPML Search, at http://opmlsearch.com/. As you might suspect, this search engine finds content in OPML files, which are for the most part lists of RSS feeds. You can also restrict your searches to just RSS, just podcasts, etc.

In exploring it I came up with three ways this search engine would be useful:

As a discovery tool -- Do a simple keyword search and you'll get items from OPML files that contain your keyword. You can restrict these items to RSS feeds or podcasts, an easy way to search for feeds by keywords. Also, knock wood ten thousand times, I found that looking for feeds this way meant that I was not getting spaham blogs in my results, probably because nobody's going to gather them in an OPML file. (I'm sure that'll change any second now.)

As a tracking tool -- Results are provided in RSS and OPML format, so you could do a keyword search and get a feed of results.

As egoboo -- Wondering who loves your feed enough to include it in an OPML file? Find out here.

There are a couple of things you have to be careful about when using this search; don't get too specific with the keywords or you won't get any results, and don't try to introduce any special syntax; I didn't find any that worked. Fun tool, though, with some hitherto unconsidered (by me) potential...

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