About A-Z feeds.com

A-Z feeds is an effort to provide a public rss search facility. The project is currently in beta testing status. AZfeeds.com is hosted by RTR Webworks, developed as a hobby project by Dindiface.

Achieved goals

You can search news (Boolean fulltext search is OK)
News fetch code is relatively stable, and fetches 38k sources in 2 threads in less that 1 day.
Fetch algo is only re-checking inactive sources after 1 week (fetch period is shorter, more fresh news)
Account creation works
Custom feeds work (finally with almost no errors)

Todos

Feed submission (really have to do that)
Improve speed - somewhat done with moving old articles into archive and upgrading the server and proxying http requests thu an other server
Clean up fetch code - looks ok
System scripts: organize cron jobs and process checking a little bit so scripts do not go havok
Rating system (will be done when we have more users)

Why Rss search

When there was CNN, a few blogs, and a few other sources, you just added them to your aggregator. Now we count over 38k sources, and no aggregator does real filtering. Actually no aggregator should do filtering, you do not want to download 600 megabytes of feeds accessing 38k+ servers and then search for keywords. But you want to have a convinient solution that gives you relevant results related to your scope of interest. I wanted one, I searched for one, but I did not find a good one, so I started to write one for fun.

How much does it costs?

Free as in "Free beer". At this time you can search feed sources that are updated in a 1-2 day frequency. When the fetch algo is well enough, you will be able to sign up and access custom feeds generated for you. It will be a free service too. For webmasters or website owners we will even provide a syndication solution, maybe with SOAP based search. We will see.

How much will it cost when it is ready?

Code is never ready, or it is ready when it is done - never. It will stay free as it is a fun and time consuming :( thing to play with. You will be able to search feeds, get alerts, syndicate to us, or have a custom feed generated for you for free.

There is not really a catch, however we might have some ads later on just to keep up with paying for the server, bandwidth etc. There might be some ads later on in the feeds, but only if it is not a syndicated feed. In other words we do not want to put our ads on your site, however we hope you can live with 1 ad in every 50 news articles we deliver into your reader. This is only the future, however it looks dark since Google Inc. just registered a patent on embedding advertisements into feeds.

Rss mozilla plugin

I just created a little search plugin that you can install into your firefox search box. It makes it possible to search our RSS feeds directory directly from mozilla firefox. The plugin also supports the firefox sidebar so you can mix our results with the big dogs: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Click on the little icon in Firefox, go to "add engines" then search for plugins. Use the search string "azfeeds" and klick to install it. Have fun with it and use the Judge link if you like or dislike it. Also report errors <, ideas or problems with it please.