I have been signing up to all sorts of web2.0 tools looking for a way to leverage my list of feeds. Many tools come close but have yet to offer quite the functionality with the level of completeness I have been after.

Matt Cutts, on commenting about the new Google customised search features, had this insight to share…

When I played with the first version, I wanted to avoid the standard stuff
where you plug in 1-2 sites and get a custom search engine that isn’t
blood-pounding-ly exciting (”Oh, a search box, and it searches. Great.”). So
what I did was take my feeds (I was using Bloglines at the time) and exported it
as an OPML file. Running a command like
cat export.opml | grep "title="
| cut -d'"' -f6 | grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq
was enough to get the
blog urls that I was reading (not the feed urls), and I threw those urls into
the custom search engine.

And just like that, *BOOM* I had a search engine that
covered 70+ blogs in the search/SEO industry. If I searched for [bug], it would
return search engine bugs, not bugs in general. OPML-import was so much fun that
the Co-op folks promised to support it (I know that importing from Bloglines
works; importing from Google Reader might still need a tweak to the OPML
parsing). It’s nice that every blogger can have a custom search engine that is
centered around their interests.

Smart guy, cuts straight through the gloss to a key use of this functionality. Hopefully they support a regular OPML import/sync from a fixed url (say a public newsgator OPML file…) so I can keep an engine up to date based purely on my web development blogs.

Combine that with certain del.icio.us links and now I have a massive information resource minus the majority of noise (you see I am not in the habit of bookmarking splogs and the like…).

In the mean time my dummy spit over that post still has me looking at other engines… A suggestion from a commenter got me back looking at snap.com. I’ve gotta say – its actually a joy to use! A recommend giving it a shot, its got liberal use of web2.0 features but in ways that really aid usability. The best feature by far being keyboard support.

Stumble it!