Subscriptions search
That was a hot year for me and BazQux Reader. Thanks to your numerous e-mails and UserVoice requests I've added a lot of new features.
BazQux got supported by many mobile apps. It got Google Reader-like list view, starred and tagged items, hardened its infrastructure, gained auto refresh, drag and drop subscriptions reordering, improved keyboard navigation and many other small features.
And today it got very important new feature that any solid RSS reader should have -- subscriptions search.
Add subscription dialog was completely redone. Now you can just enter blog title or a part of blog URL to search and subscribe for it:
Besides URL or title you can look for topics by using hashtag. Like #comics:
And there are about 40 topics to chose if you have no idea what are you looking for ;) I even need two screenshots to fit them all:
And, as always, you can just paste the site or feed URL and press Enter to immediately subscribe to the feed.
The thing I'm especially proud of is that search result depends on your country. So you get one news sites list in USA and another one in Germany or Russia.
For most people country should be detected automatically but in case it's wrong (or you just want to look what people read in other country) there is an option to change it at the bottom of the topics list:
I've put few major countries on top but there are more than 200 of them to chose (although search results vary only for countries with the most registered users):
There are about 0.5M feeds to chose. For privacy reasons only feeds with 10 or more subscribers are listed (or feeds with standard names like blog.example.com/feed).
Another privacy note. Topics you search for (and see under some feed names) are taken from folder names where you put your subscriptions. At least 5 different people must put the same feed into the folder with the same name for this folder to become a topic. I'm filtering out folders with names like "family", "friends" and so on. And I have manually viewed about 2K of used topics to be sure that they're really look like topics and not like some private folder. Thanks to "at least 5 different people" rule most folders to filter out were actually named "daily", "other", "to read", etc.
I don't see any way to deduce sensible information of any of you by using subscriptions search. Used topic (folder) names are neutral, only popular feeds or feeds with standard names are indexed (no private feeds should appear in search) and of course there is no way to see who subscribed to the feed.
Maybe it's clean anyway that some anonymized personal information is used in subscriptions search. Just want to be clear about what information is used and how.
And a bit more about ordering of results.
For country dependent search results at least 10 people from the same country should be subscribed to the feed. Otherwise total subscribers number is used for sorting search results. So if you browse topics and don't see some popular local blog just tell more people in your country to use BazQux Reader! ;)
Noisy feeds with too many posts per day as well as feeds that haven't updated for a long time are penalized and go down in search results.
I decided to not show subscribers counts. It looked ugly and attracted too much attention (human eye always looks for digits first when sees the text).
I hope you will like today's update. It should be much easier now to discover new feeds.
BazQux got supported by many mobile apps. It got Google Reader-like list view, starred and tagged items, hardened its infrastructure, gained auto refresh, drag and drop subscriptions reordering, improved keyboard navigation and many other small features.
And today it got very important new feature that any solid RSS reader should have -- subscriptions search.
Add subscription dialog was completely redone. Now you can just enter blog title or a part of blog URL to search and subscribe for it:
Besides URL or title you can look for topics by using hashtag. Like #comics:
And there are about 40 topics to chose if you have no idea what are you looking for ;) I even need two screenshots to fit them all:
And, as always, you can just paste the site or feed URL and press Enter to immediately subscribe to the feed.
The thing I'm especially proud of is that search result depends on your country. So you get one news sites list in USA and another one in Germany or Russia.
For most people country should be detected automatically but in case it's wrong (or you just want to look what people read in other country) there is an option to change it at the bottom of the topics list:
There are about 0.5M feeds to chose. For privacy reasons only feeds with 10 or more subscribers are listed (or feeds with standard names like blog.example.com/feed).
Another privacy note. Topics you search for (and see under some feed names) are taken from folder names where you put your subscriptions. At least 5 different people must put the same feed into the folder with the same name for this folder to become a topic. I'm filtering out folders with names like "family", "friends" and so on. And I have manually viewed about 2K of used topics to be sure that they're really look like topics and not like some private folder. Thanks to "at least 5 different people" rule most folders to filter out were actually named "daily", "other", "to read", etc.
I don't see any way to deduce sensible information of any of you by using subscriptions search. Used topic (folder) names are neutral, only popular feeds or feeds with standard names are indexed (no private feeds should appear in search) and of course there is no way to see who subscribed to the feed.
Maybe it's clean anyway that some anonymized personal information is used in subscriptions search. Just want to be clear about what information is used and how.
And a bit more about ordering of results.
For country dependent search results at least 10 people from the same country should be subscribed to the feed. Otherwise total subscribers number is used for sorting search results. So if you browse topics and don't see some popular local blog just tell more people in your country to use BazQux Reader! ;)
Noisy feeds with too many posts per day as well as feeds that haven't updated for a long time are penalized and go down in search results.
I decided to not show subscribers counts. It looked ugly and attracted too much attention (human eye always looks for digits first when sees the text).
I hope you will like today's update. It should be much easier now to discover new feeds.