Techmeme has added a missing piece of functionality to its search feature--RSS. Now users can subscribe to results for any query and have them show up in widgets and RSS readers.
Not exactly a super newsworthy event, but increasingly news aggregation and filtering services, including Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, Blogrunner and a host of others, are filling in the gap between the overflow of content from the thousands of sources and RSS readers. Some RSS readers, such as NewsGator, are adding collaborative filtering to surface recommended stories. FriendFeed is adding a summarization feature to filter content. Twitter has a tracking feature for making better sense of conversations.
The ultimate filtering is to have intelligent software agents combing through billions of documents in real time, traversing 3D simulated worlds and finding the relationships, clusters, anomalies and other artifacts and presenting just the right content at the right time to users in an optimal form for consumption. That dream is still a long way off...
My favorite tech news "aggrefilter" Techmeme finally added a search function. It provides search results in reverse chronological order, but only for items that have appeared as full headlines on Techmeme.
Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera explains the new search function, which was developed by Omer Horvitz:
There are two overall modes of searching, depending on how "close" a result is desired. The default mode only returns matches occurring in the title or the first couple of sentences. Searching for "Yahoo" in this mode typically return stories about Yahoo. Unchecking "Search title & summary only" on the result page (or the bare bones page) enables search of the full article text. In this mode, any article simply mentioning "Yahoo" will appear.
Narrowing results by source url, author, date, and other attributes is also supported. For instance, "sourceurl:http://searchengineland.com/" returns posts only from the blog Search Engine Land (as seen here). A concise list of all the search operators involved is available through the "Advanced" link on a search results page (or again, on the bare bones page).
What's next? Search for Techmeme's sister sites are planned but not active as of today. Also on the way are RSS feeds for search results, the simplest kind of search "API."
See also: TechCrunch
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