Search feeds

[susanreads]

Title:
Search feeds

Area:
feeds

Summary:
A search function for the list of existing feeds, to avoid creating duplicates

Description:
The list of most popular feeds seems to contain some duplicates; I don't know whether a feed was recreated because someone couldn't find it, or whether they are reading different feeds from the same site (maybe with filtered content or different amounts of detail, or a posts feed and a comments feed).

I would like to be able to find any existing feeds from a specified domain (or subdomain e.g. LiveJournal account), with an indication of the feed contents (snippet, whole post, including cut text but not the content under the cut ...) if that info is available. This would avoid creating duplicates, and possibly make it easier for people to find what they want to read.

Problem: I don't know whether RSS (or Atom) feed headers include the info I'd want to see.

Poll #1209 Search feeds

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
18 (62.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (6.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
9 (31.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[denise]

Just noting that the feed creation system *does* check for duplicate feeds; most of the duplicates are due to using two different addresses (Atom vs RSS; site itself vs Feedburner, etc), which is something that can never 100% be addressed.

[sara]

Is there some way to search what's already got a feed, though, rather than scrolling through the feeds list?

[denise]

Entering the feed URL on the create page will show you the feed account if it exists already, and give you the option to subscribe. If it doesn't exist with that URL, it lets you create it.

[zarhooie]

So you want the search function to also work on feeds?

[cesy]

This bug is for fuzzier feed matching, which would catch the Atom vs. RSS cases.

A search on the name and address of feeds would go some way towards solving this, and is, I think, the main thing you're suggesting.

Tagging feeds with interests and helpful things (like "comments" or "posts") would probably fix the rest, but is a big thing to implement and should be a separate suggestion.

[susanreads]

Yes! That is what I was looking for. Hurray!

Btw, on that "co-ordination" issue, since I don't want to spam zvi's journal, shall I PM you?

[cesy]

Yep :)

[ninetydegrees]

+1 for feed search but I would also like to be able to search by name/title.

[turlough]

+1