Comments for Feedly Mini Learns How to Search

Feedly Mini Learns How to Search

2009-04-18T00:10:00Z

The social news utility Feedly announced on its blog that it just added the ability to perform a supplemental search on content it knows about on any of a number of different sites like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon and more. Results from this parallel search appear in Feedly Mini, an unobtrusive pop-up notification area in the lower-right corner of the Firefox browser window. Search results are drawn from FriendFeed, Google Reader feeds and other sources.

]]> Feedly is not that easy to describe in just a few words. Part feed reader (integrates with Google Reader), part social network aggregator (grabs conversations from FriendFeed, Twitter, and RSS feeds), part search utility (simultaneously searching your feeds, FriendFeed, YouTube and other sources for results), and part application (it's a Firefox plugin), what can be said for sure is that it is completely awesome. And it seems like every month, a new cool feature is slipstreamed into Feedly's framework that makes it even more useful or interesting.

Most recently, Feedly has been working on enhancing the functionality of Feedly Mini (which we cover here) to go beyond being a convenient place to share the page you are currently reading. Previously, the occasional mysterious topic result would appear if you were on a page relating to, say, politics or movies. Now, that feature has been expanded and refined to work on any search query on certain sites, like Google or Amazon. Feedly quickly brings up a weighted result list of discussions and links, along with a link to the originating sites. The search that is performed is done on the client, and no search data is being sent back to Feedly, Google Reader or any other service. The new feature, just like Feedly mini itself, can be turned off in Feedly options as well.

Overall, the new search feature is nicely implemented and we think it will come in very useful. We do have one small wish though, to cover those corner cases where you might be searching for something, say an article on Wikipedia or a product on eBay that you want to share with your friends on Twitter or Friendfeed.. in those cases, we want both the functions of Feedly Mini on the same page - search and share buttons. But for the moment we can't figure out how to turn that on. It either does one or the other, depending on what site you are on.

Comment from Dali Burgado on 2009-06-16

2009-06-17T05:21:06Z

Hi Phil,

I absolutely love Feedly! Totally rocks. I've got a series on Feedly on my blog in fact.

I particularly enjoy the ease at which you can get social and disseminate your favorite articles to your followers.

I haven't found anything that compares to Feedly.

Dali Burgado

Comment from TheMindRelaxer on 2009-04-18

2009-04-18T10:24:15Z

Interesting, very useful indeed. Looking forward to using it.

Comment from Jalada on 2009-04-18

2009-04-18T10:22:59Z

Noticed this appearing in my browser, really like it!

Comment from Luke on 2009-04-17

2009-04-18T01:13:30Z

This topic is always fun. Although we didn't put the resources into creating an add-on, we have a combined Google and Twitter search here: http://www.blastcasta.com/google-twitter-search.aspx

An advantage, aside from seeing tweets on a search topic, is the ability to take the Twitter feed and not only subscribe to it, but also filter, translate, or add it as a widget to a website or blog.

Anyways, adding recent conversations as results to a search, is something we'd like to see more.

Comment from Edwin Khodabakchian on 2009-04-17

2009-04-18T00:25:02Z

Robert: glad you like this. There is now a very simple way to show people how friendfeed is better than twitter search: do you search on twitter and see the popup show you the friendfeed results and compare the two in real-time.