QDIS Blog

While the Yahoo advanced search page has a pop up menu to limit the file format results to only web (rss or atom) feeds, Google does not. Google does allow you to limit your search to other file formats but unfortunately rss/xml is not one of them. However, you can get the results you want by taking advantage of the advanced syntax Google has available. One of those is the “inurl” command. Almost all feeds contain one of several key words within the url. This includes xml, atom, rss rdf, and feed. While not all inclusive, this will find the vast majority of feeds. Here is an example search for feeds related to science:

science inurl:(rss OR rdf OR atom OR xml OR feed)

You need to make sure and include the colon and that there is no space between the colon and the left parenthesis.

While this is not a perfect solution, it does go a long way towards allowing you to use Google to find only web (rss) feeds. If you enjoyed this tip, then be sure to listen to the soon to be posted Searching the Internet podcast episode 2 where I’ll discuss the various advanced commands in Google and Yahoo as well as other search engine related topics.

Technorati Tags: Google, inurl, search engine, web feed

Email Ed Vawter

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Exalead is a newcomer to the search engine business and has grown at a tremendous rate. At the beginning of Feb they announced their database consisted of over 4 billion web pages and it continues to grow at a rapid rate. It will be interesting to watch how the growth continues and how long it is until they double again. However, I’ve always been of the belief that doubling the amount of garbage doesn’t give you better results. While size is important, it’s more important that the results returned truly reflect what you are looking for. I’ve used Exalead for searches in my area of expertise and they do bring up the best and most relevant sites. I’m hoping that as the database grows, the quality of the relevant results doesn’t suffer.

One of the things about them that I like is the ability to limit your search results to RSS feeds. After a search, in the bar below the text search box, you have three buttons; audio, video, and RSS. If you click on RSS, it limits your results to those containing feeds. Unfortunately, you can’t get the results of the search by RSS.

Another thing I like is they have made sure the search engine works under Safari on the Mac platform. The fact that the results include a thumbnail preview of the website is great too. This is definitely a search engine to keep an eye on.

Email Ed Vawter

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Yahoo Answers has some new features and they involve RSS feeds. I’m a big fan of RSS and Yahoo since they were the first major search engines to allow you to search specifically for RSS format. They are still my favorite place to go to find new feeds on a given topic. But back to Yahoo Answers; they have added the ability to track just about anything via RSS.

Being interested in chemistry here’s the feed for chemistry related questions. Looking over the open questions, it seems some may be homework questions. I’ve always wondered how much the Internet has changed homework and the whole educational situation, but that’s another topic for another day.

You can easily form your own query without even visiting Yahoo answers just by changing the url. Here’s one I did for Hawaii

feed://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=hawaii

You can form your own feed by changing “hawaii” to whatever terms you want.

Another feature is you can track questions by users. You can track and see what questions individuals are asking. I find this interesting and it reminds me that you need to be careful what you post on the Internet.

While I’ve not personally found this to be all that worthwhile it could is another interesting use of RSS.

Email Ed Vawter

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