Searches in multiple RSS feeds -> new rss feed

[Motta (archive)]

Hi

I'd like a function that searches through several RSS feeds, and generates a new feed with the results.

Example:

Searching in

ScienceDaily Magazine - http://www.sciencedaily.com/newsfeed.xml

Neurology and Neuroscience Reports -
http://www.biomedcentral.com/currneuroneuroscirep/rss/

Medical News Today - http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.xml

For the phrase 'multiple sclerosis' and generates a new feed containing the results

Anyone seen that or knows how to do it?

Morten

 

[Andy Dingley]

Anyone seen that or knows how to do it?

Yes, I built such an aggregator a few years ago (2001).

Then I stopped work on it. The sad thing was that it worked beautifully when the feeds contained good metadata, very poorly when they didn't. And even today, metadata is the exception rather than the rule.

It's quite easy to build an aggregator that can be configured to look for "multiple sclerosis" stories. It's interestingly more complex to build one that you don't configure, but can observe your chosen reading patterns (Bayesian algorithms help, and look at what teh spam-filtering people are doing). However a similar search for "planes" (in the woodworking sense) is doomed, because it's swamped by the aircraft industry. This is a similar problem to Google's in indexing the web. If there's a PigeonRank out there for aggregators, then it's unknown to me.

It's an interesting project though. If I had money to live off, I might do some work on it.