RSS and Blog Post Search

RSS Search is garnering an increasing attention of late. Dave Aiello compares two RSS search engines:

Unique rssSearch features:
– visible relevance scoring
– detailed “Search Report” for each search, including: database statistics, equivalent search parameters, result summary for each part of the search term
– similarity searching based on key attributes of one indexed document

Unique Feedster features:
– “filter out” capabilities, to remove a given blog from search results
– dynamic RSS generation, based on search parameters
– visible display of number of links in article
direct link to comments on articles in search results, in some cases

At the moment, rssSearch appears to be the more statistically-oriented of the two pure RSS Search Engines. But, Feedster seems to have an edge on Blogosphere-integration with its dynamic RSS feature. This looks like it is definitely worth an experiment or two.

I think more than RSS the focus needs to get to the blog post. RSS is just a proxy for the blog. In most cases, the RSS feed is a abridged version of the post. But there’s enough information in there to get to theactual blog post.

Google’s granularity of search is a page. It does not separate a page into its components. That is what is needed. That is what we need to look at in BlogStreet. Blogs have a specific structure. The RSS feed can help in componentising the web page, which can make it possible to extract and then search the posts.