Feed Search Merry-Go-Round
There are a number of blog search engines out there, and most of them allow you to create a "watch list", which is an RSS feed specifically for your search terms. This is very useful for things like egosurfing and competitive intelligence.
I've started noticing that the results feed of one search service are starting to show up as a source in another: so I'm beginning to see PubSub results in my Blogdigger feed, and Technorati results in my Feedster feed. This might be a tough problem to solve, as some of the services actually transform the feed as it flows through their system, so a search engine can't do a simple item compare to detect duplicates.
Ah, one of the interesting challenges of a loosely coupled environment.
Comments
Good point; we actually do attempt to remove results from other search services, as this often casuses duplicate results. The problem is that we have a Groups feature that takes any feed, and we currently don't exclude feeds in Groups from the main search index. This should be fixed in a short while, though.
Posted by: Greg | January 5, 2005 01:59 PM
We've been seeing it a bit too. We try to exclude Google News Alerts which have been turned into feeds and the Feedburner guys have been good about not letting people "burn" Feedster search feeds. There might need to be a registry of dynamic domains or subdomains that all the other sites avoid indexing.
Posted by: Scott Rafer | January 7, 2005 09:03 PM