Google released this nifty little feature (a few months back) where you can create a “custom search engine” that searches sites defined by you. This is extremely useful if you subscribe to a large number of feeds, and comes in handy when trying to find articles you know you read but forgot where. As far as I can tell, you can’t import an OPML file when initially creating the engine – pretty annoying. So, instead you need to create the engine first then go Edit -> Advanced -> Upload Annotation File. For more information check out the official Google CSE blog here. I added My Feeds CSE to this blog (upper left), but keep in mind that Google is still working out the kinks.
If you are interested in custom search engines you might also want to check out FeedBurner’s “networks”. Similar concept with a bigger focus on aggregating feeds and monetization through advertising. You subscribe to a network and receive all posts for member blogs (aggregated). Brad Feld is the coordinator of the FeedBurner Venture Capital network – a collection of 62 VC blogs with over 150,000 subscribers. These networks seems useful from a discovery standpoint, but further abstract the relationship between bloggers and their audience. It’s great for advertisers though – yet another distribution mechanism and highly targeted. What we need are more tools that help facilitate communication on the web like CoComment and MyBlogLog . It will be interesting how this plays out.
I’m going to start playing around with these CSE’s and networks a bit and will let you know how it goes. Feel free to send comments in about your experiences.
