The blogosphere has regrown some connective tissue with the presence of Feedle, a search engine for blogs and podcasts. Feedle is both a consumer and producer of RSS, as developer Preslav Rachev explained in the launch announcement from 2022:
The thing I like most about Feedle is that it is about making RSS feeds more accessible to the general public. And not just any RSS feeds. The team has decided to carefully curate what goes inside the index, focusing on the content by individuals and small organizations (startups, collectives, teams, etc.) first.
But what is Feedle after all? It is a dedicated search engine for blogs and podcasts -- anything with a public RSS feed. What makes it unique is that every search on Feedle is also its own RSS feed. This allows visitors to subscribe to topics of interest rather than hundreds of individual feeds.
To subscribe to an RSS feed for a search on Feedle, click the orange RSS button on a page of search results and the URL of the feed appears to the left of the button. Here's the feed for the term "RSS specification":
https://feedle.world/rss/?query=RSS+specification
Copy the URL and add the feed in your RSS reader.
Feedle has a submission form for bloggers seeking to be included in its database of blogs. The most recent count I've seen indicates there are 2,000 blogs in its database. There were once several popular blog search engines, including Technorati, Google Blog Search and IceRocket, but they've all shut down or morphed into something else. In the early days of blogging the best way to find people talking about your posts was on Technorati. Founder David Sifry shows up in the comments of The RSS Blog as we helped them tackle some bugs.
Categories: RSS, Blog Search, Feedle, Technorati
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