A couple of weeks ago I set up four RSS feeds for the search term “journalism weblogs” using Feedster, Blogdigger, Bloglines, Google Alerts and Google News. The idea was to find out which of these sources would produce not only the most results but also the most quality and relevant results to my aggregator. Again, I know this isn’t an earth-shattering idea, but I’m thinking that at some point I may aggregate more search feeds than individual Weblogs. I haven’t collected any hard data on this, but I would guess that probably only about a third of what I collect from the edu-Webloggers that are in my Blogroll is really interesting and relevant to me. What if the search feeds I read were, say 75% relevant? Wouldn’t that make it more worth my time? I’m still working through this idea, but I plan to do more and more study and comparison with these types of feeds.

Anyway, I took a look at the posts from each of the five feeds listed above for the past week and here’s what I found:
Feedster — 75 total entries, 58 unique. All in all, the best results came from Feedster. I was actually surprised how many more hits Feedster returned, and I was also surprised how much good stuff I found there that the others ignored.
Bloglines — 38 entries, 22 unique. There were only a couple of posts that Bloglines found that Feedster didn’t. Just about all of the posts were relevant.
Google News — 31 entries, 21 unique. Google News is obviously different from the others in that it searches newspapers for its results, not Weblogs. In fact, I would say that to get the best results, and search should be done with Google News in tandem with Feedster.
Blogdigger — 11 entries, 9 unique. Ironically, just in terms of relevance, the results in Blogdigger were all great. It just seemed to miss a lot of the other good stuff out there.
Google Alert — 0 entries. Google Alert searches new sites that are added to the Google database. Nothing new this week, I guess.

So what does this mean? Not sure yet, though it would be cool to have one search that combines blogs and newspapers. Is there one out there that I’ve missed?

Another spot to create search feeds from Google News has been put up by XMLMania. This one seems a bit more developed than the one I had been using before, and in fact at first blush, it looks like the results are a lot more relevant (though I’m not really sure why…) At any rate, this is just a great way of keeping up with what’s going on in a particular topic, especially with the ability Manila and some others have of pushing the rss feed to various parts of the page.
—–