I need 50-hour days

The ability to do a search and get results was piloted by the Baltimore Sun newspaper a couple years ago. I’d guess it’s kind of like creating an rss feed on the fly.

Won’t disclose too much here, but I took your advice and built this around categories mainly. Those are: sport, language and country.

I made it work like filters, thus you can combine any or all categories to get the feeds for those combinations. I also made it into a WP plugin which I might release publicly over time. That is if I can set myself to make it nicer & more generally useful in the future.

I purposely neglected to base this filters on any user given information but rather on our manual categorization of the feeds. This is due to the crazy times we’re managing, we can’t possibly get our bloggers to tag correctly quickly enough to rely on that. But aggregating and sorting on that pieces of information that the authors themselves provide is probably going to make noise on my head on the upcoming months.

I really like your idea on search. I think this is somewhat unexplored ground (we search webpages daily, but feed content very rarely).

A good way to do this could be caching feeds somehow and taking advantage of what the feed owners add as bulk information (categories, tags, keywords).

Feeds work mainly for changing content, so the question rises: how much / for how long to cache?

Food for thought