November 13, 2005

MSN 's Live.com and Start.com Offer "Feed" Only Search Tab

It looks like MSN continues to slowly release its feed search tool. In August, Danny and others posted about two "undocumented"* pieces of MSN Search syntax that allowed you to limit your search to only material that comes from feeds.

Well, that was 2 months ago and now via either the new Live.com or the Start.com sites you'll find a tab that allows you to see only material coming from feeds. Needless to say, this is still early (very) beta stuff and lots of work needs to be done.

To keyword search only "feeds," enter your terms in the main search box (duh!) and then click the "Feeds" tab. You can also search feeds by selecting the "Add Content" link in the left column.

What's Available + Option to click and subscribe to feed on Start.com or Live.com page + Cache of each post, in some cases a date is provided + It seems that some of MSN's advanced syntax (ie: intitle, language, etc.) works

What's Not Available + Sort by date + At this point I was only able to find posts about two days old

* Those pieces of syntax are not documented on this MSN help page.

Postscript: MS's Live.com now works with Firefox.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:13 PM | Permalink

August 31, 2005

MSN Search Gains New Feed Searching Commands

MSN Searches RSS Deeper from Robin Good looks at how MSN Search now has two new undocumented feed searching commands, including the ability to full-text search within feeds.

The first command is feed: that allows you to tell MSN Search that you want to search for material just within feeds it has indexed, rather than across web pages and other documents. It's similar to existing filetype commands that let you limit searching to things such as Word documents or PDF files.

How about an example? Try feed:"hurricane katrina", and you'll get a list of feeds that have that exact phrase within them. Look at the first page listed, a feed from the National Hurricane Center. In the cached copy, you'll see that phrase appearing in the feed.

Keep in mind that only text in a feed is indexed, and that may be different from the text in a post referenced in a feed. In other words, some blogs and other sources don't send out the full text of their posts in feeds. In other cases, some people will write custom descriptions so that what's in the feed will be different than what's on the page.

Overall, the feed: command isn't that wonderful, though it's still nice to have. Use it if you're trying to narrow down a mention that may have happened in the blogosphere, since many blogs have feeds, so this is a way to drill into that subset of content. But plenty of non-blog pages also have feeds, so it's not perfect. Plus, since you're only looking in feeds rather than the full text of post, you might miss items you are interested in.

The second command is hasfeed: that's supposed to bring back any page that links to a feed that has those words in the feed content, from what I understand. That's not what I found, however. Running hasfeed:google brought back the Google home page first, and that page has no feed on it nor any links to feeds that I can see.

Robin's article has a few examples he was sent by MSN, and it seems like using hasfeed: with site: works better, as a way to see if a particular site offers any feeds. For example, hasfeed: site:searchenginewatch.com does bring back pages within the searchenginewatch.com domain and subdomains that link to feeds -- since we have a link to every feed on every page.

A better combination shown in the examples Robin was sent is something like feed: site:searchenginewatch.com. That brings back only feed content from within the searchenginewatch.com domain and subdomains -- and it did catch all the major ones we have. Our old feed URLs are being used, rather than the new redirected ones. But the redirect change just happened last week, so that's not too surprising.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:59 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2005

MSN Says We'll Slow Down The News & Feed Crawling

Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny noticed that MSN Search seemed to be overactively hitting his RSS feed, prompting MSN Search to respond via its blog that the news and blog crawler in testing may have been a tad hyperactive. MSN promises some tuning to get it to behave.

FYI, MSNBot does have instructions you can use to tell it to slow down, something put in place soon after the main web crawler prompted some complaints last year, when it was a bit hyperactive.

It's unclear whether the news/blog/feed crawler is using the same robot name and thus responding to the same commands. Jeremy doesn't have them on his site, nor did Greg Hughes who also blogged a complaint, but others who have complained might have.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:10 PM | Permalink

July 27, 2005

New MSN Screen Saver With Search & RSS Integration

Need a screensaver? The new MSN Screen Saver puts a search box on display, plus shows you RSS feeds, photos from your desktop and more. Seem odd to have a search box in your screen saver? Yes and no. It's odd in that if you go to use your computer, you want your screen saver to go away. But it's smart in that if you like the other things the screen saver offers then realize you need to search for something, there's a search box -- and MSN's search box -- ready to go. Yahoo and Google don't offer screen savers that I know about. I'm sure they'll come. More details on the MSN Search Blog: MSN Screensaver with Search & RSS

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:58 AM | Permalink

July 20, 2005

MSN Updates Start.com Site with New Features

Yesterday, MSN's experimental Start.com customizable homepage received a few updates and bug fixes that you can read about on the Start.com blog.

The most noticeable change comes in the way search results are displayed. Start.com results pages now allow you to quickly move between web results, news results, and RSS results via tab links at the top of the page. RSS results come from feed directory that's powered by Moreover and also used at My MSN.. Also, Start.com now allows you to subscribe to feeds via a link next to each RSS result.

Ok, MSN has a searchable directory of RSS feeds. However, you've got to think that it will be sooner rather than later when MS releases their own fully functioning and standalone RSS engine. We've mentioned that MSN was developing an RSS engine a couple of times on SEW. Once, last November in Chris's original review of MSN Search and again a few weeks later in a blog post by Danny.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:01 PM | Permalink

February 8, 2005

Pinging Moreover To Feed MSN

Back in December, we wrote of the Moreover ping server that helps the news search engine understand when you've published new feed content. Think of it as a sort of Add URL system for feeds. Robin Good takes a closer look in Submit Your RSS Feed To MSN Search Via XML-RPC on why pinging Moreover is even more important due to its feed discovery partnership with MSN.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:59 AM | Permalink

MSN Search Fixes Country-Specific Feed Bug

Good news. Earlier I noted how MSN Search's RSS feeds wouldn't bring back results from the main/US MSN Search if you were outside the US. That seems to have been fixed.

Bad news. If you want to monitor the same query at MSN Search versus a country-specific MSN Search site, they may step on each other.

For example, I want to watch the same query for MSN Search and MSN Search UK, as they can give different results. Unfortunately, the results for these two different feeds flow into the same NewsGator folder I use to read feeds, since the title of both feeds is the same.

Huh? Say you want to watch the query "cars" on MSN Search and MSN Search UK. The URLs for those queries are below. The US one is shown first, then the UK one, with the difference bolded on the UK one:

Now you decide you want to subscribe to a feed of these results, so you can see how they change over time at both places. At the bottom of the results is an RSS box you can use to get the feed address. And below, the URLs for those feeds:

So far, you can see the difference -- one comes from the .com site, the other from the .co.uk site. But the titles of the feeds? Those are the same:

MSN Search: cars
MSN Search: cars

As a results, NewsGator puts the content of the feeds into the same place, given the feed titles are the same. Other aggregators might do the same -- or perhaps not. But to be safe, it would be nice if the feed titles reflected that the feeds are different, such as:

MSN Search: cars
MSN Search UK: cars

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:01 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2005

MSN Search's RSS Feeds

When I did my write-up on the new MSN Search site, I'd mentioned that RSS feeds of search results were available but clunky in how to get them. That's because at the time of the write-up, MSN had told me that they didn't have any special links you could use to get them. But that quickly changed once the launch actually happened. Do a search, and at the bottom of the results page you should find an orange RSS box. Use that to subscribe to a feed of that search.

What exactly do you get when subscribing? The top results for the first page of the query you are monitoring. The feed then checks back on whatever schedule you've set with your feed reader to recover any new entries. Say you check once per day. If two new sites rotate into the top results, then you'd get sent a post of each individually.

Important note! If you are outside the US, even if you subscribe to US results, you'll still get those related to the country you are in. For example, I'm in the UK. I can override MSN trying to force me to the MSN UK site as I've written before. But I can't do this within my feeds.

MSN says it's aware of this bug and hopes to correct it in the next few weeks.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:05 PM | Permalink

January 25, 2005

My MSN Adds Feed Discovery Support

As rumored to come, MSN has now added added feed discovery and subscription services for those using its My MSN service.

A new feed search tool is offered at the top of the My MSN home page or you can also find it here, if you are signed in. It allows you to search for feeds that contain the words you are looking for in automatically-created descriptions.

Note that this is not the same as searching through the full-text of feeds themselves. As a result, individual postings put out in feed format and blogs are not searchable, in the way a service like Feedster allows.

In addition, this is not a blog search engine. That's because any site may have feeds, so a feed search includes more than blogs. In addition, some blogs don't have feeds and so wouldn't be included in a feed search service.

MSN is working on actual blog search engine that is supposed to come in the future to its main MSN Search site that's open to the public without registration. To date, no major search engine yet offers blog search. My MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search? article looks at this more.

In the meantime, the feed discovery tool on My MSN is powered by Moreover. This isn't disclosed with a "powered by" disclaimer when you do a search, but after subscribing to a feed, Moreover clickthrough redirection is used. In addition, the company is named a partner in the following articles spotted via Greg Linden's blog:

MyMSN introduces RSS aggregation (SiliconBeat)
MSN tests new blog, search features (News.com)

Once a feed has been found, My MSN users can then subscribe to it and read posts via boxes added to their My MSN home page. MSN also provides the ability to quickly select from small list of major site -- what it calls Recommended Sources -- via an All Content.

Yahoo has offered feed discovery and subscription for several months, as the Yahoo, How About A Feed Search Tab? explores more. Google remains lacking in this area.

Via the MSN Search Blog, news also that MSN has launched a new MSN Syndicated Content page. That page lists all the feeds that come from MSN itself. The company also sticks with the RSS name for feeds despite some debate on what RSS stands, different flavors of RSS and a rival format for feeds called Atom (note that most feedreaders can handle any format).

Interestingly, MSN itself doesn't find the name that descriptive or user-friendly. Hey MSN, "syndicated content" isn't that descriptive to a person new to feeds, either. Nevertheless, it went forward with RSS as this SiliconBeat article describes for lack of anything better.

As a result, the acronym will likely continue as the def acto term for describing feeds. Meanwhile, Dave Winer takes a swing that My MSN will be making use of its own subscription buttons to promote signing up via My MSN, as described here. Others like Yahoo also have their own buttons.

For more on the issue of various feed promotion buttons and discovery difficulties, see my past post, More On Making Feed Discovery & Subscription Easier.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:31 AM | Permalink

January 12, 2005

My MSN To Gain Feed Reading & Blog Search Features

John Battelle mentioned news that the My MSN service will gain feed reading features and blog search functions, and SiliconBeat provides even more details in MyMSN introduces RSS aggregation.

I've looked and seen no sign of the features yet. I did try the "Add Content" window with My MSN but couldn't find Search Engine Watch or a few other sites with RSS feeds listed. A search for RSS itself, however, did bring back 17 matches from major news sites, such as the Washington Post.

It sounds like the new blog search engine that MSN has promised may take over to provide better matches from across the web sometime this week. Moreover is cited in the SiliconBeat story as powering the blog search.

Yahoo already provides feed reading capabilities and a feed discovery service -- though a full-blown, dedicated blog search service there hasn't yet happened. As said, MSN has promised it would do this. If it materializes on the MSN Search site itself, it will be a new chapter for search engines.

Google's also promised long ago that a blog search service would emerge, but that has yet to materialize. My past post, MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?, summarizes past promises and capabilities from all of them.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:21 AM | Permalink

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