Create Your Own Collection Of Searchable RSS Feeds With ScoopGo & Blogdigger Groups

A quick post to point out Tara’s recent item (when Tara writes, we read) about ScoopGo, a new tool that allows the user to create a searchable database of whatever feeds they choose (up to 30). Overall, Calishain is positive about the service and says she looks forward to seeing it evolve. I agree.

The concept of creating a personalized search engine based the feeds you select is not a new concept. In fact, a service I mentioned a week or so ago has offered what they call a “groups” feature for quite some time.

Blogdigger Groups (BG) is what I’m talking about and comes from Blogdigger, an RSS engine built and maintained by Greg Gershman and Mike Miller of Baltimore. BG is a service I’m finding more and more uses for.

Blogdigger Groups is not without its issues but Greg tells me that they’re doing their best to make the service easier to use and more reliable especially in keeping the most current feeds crawled and searchable.

Here’s how BG describes itself:

Blogdigger Groups allows you to combine the contents of two or more blogs making the combined content easily accessible all at once.

In a nutshell (and a small nutshell at that) here’s how it works:
+ You can search your feeds as a single group or one at a time.
+ Export your group into OPML or OCS
+ Receive your group as its own RSS feed
+ Sort results by date or relevance
+ Groups can be public or private

Let’s Create a Personalized Group of Search Feeds:
+ Input title and Contact info
+ Determine the type of group (public or private)
+ Decide Group Password
+ Decide Moderated or Unmoderated, Create Password if Needed
+ Click to create group

Now, start entering the feed urls or import a list using OPML. It’s that easy.
As an example, take a look at this group, Search Stuff, that includes the blogs from several engines and web tools. Something similar here. More examples here.

As I mentioned earlier, Blogdigger Groups has been undergoing some growing pains of late but Greg is on top of it, so keep an eye on this easy to use and increasingly useful search service.

Postscript: The question has come up if it it’s possible to easily create a limited or focused type of search engine using the database of a large general purpose web engine? The answer is yes. Of course, a power searcher could do all sorts of things to limit to specific domains but that’s well beyond the scope of most people. A fairly new service called Rollyo allows the user to create a focused engine based on up to 25 urls using Yahoo. Select, enter, and go. In this SEW Blog post I offer an overview of Rollyo and point out both its strengths and weaknesses.