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Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

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Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

#1

Post by lowercasename »

Alternative search engines are neat, as are RSS feeds. OpenOrb is a self-hosted app which allows visitors to search over a list of blogs you love. If you put your 10 favourite blogs in there, it'll search just those blogs and not show you any sponsored content or machine-generated garbage (unless... you follow blogs written by machines?)

Personal RSS feed readers can usually do this sort of thing, but RSS readers aren’t meant to be shared, so you can think of the search engine as a 'curated feed list as a public service'.

I wrote a longer blog post about OpenOrb here: https://raphael.computer/blog/openorb-curated-search-engine/

Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds
openorb.idiot.sh

Re: Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

#2

Post by gbrindisi »

I really like the idea! At some point I put up a miniflux instance and it has surprisingly been a breath of fresh air for my content consumption. What miniflux and my setup lacks is a way to retrieve stuff I read and this OpenOrb might fit the use case... I will try it out!

Re: Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

#4

Post by marginalia_nu »

Tangentially on this note, if anyone is interested, I can produce a list of every RSS feed known to the marginalia search crawler. It's a pretty noisy list, but any thing I can do to help the spread, discovery and adoption of RSS I'm happy to help with so just let me know.

I a tool in place to export this data to help power the experimental RSS preview feature[1], but haven't had the inspiration to do much with that yet.

[1] e.g. https://search.marginalia.nu/site/jvns.ca

--edit-- Ok so there was interest. Give me a moment, I'll need to run an extraction script. Check back in a few hours or bookmark https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/

Re: Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

#7

Post by djoldman »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #4

Tangentially on this note, if anyone is interested, I can produce a list of every RSS feed known to the marginalia search crawler. It's a pretty noisy list, but any thing I can do to help the spread, discovery and adoption of RSS I'm happy to help with so just let me know. I a tool in place to export this data to help power the experimental RSS preview feature[1], but haven't had the inspiration to do much with that…

I think the community would be interested in list and you'd get a lot of downloads if you offered it up.

Re: Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

#8

Post by keepamovin »

tl wrote: post #6
keepamovin wrote: post #5

I wonder when RSS will experience its "Google Search in 1997" moment? Right now it's beginning to nibble at Yahoo Directory days

That would be 2005 when Google Reader launched. RSS for people who didn't know what RSS was.

No, I mean: "Google" moment as in what Google originally was. Let me rephrase in edit my original comment to "Google Search" moment.

Basically, when Google came on the scene in 1997, it blew away Yahoo Directory. Do I have my dates right? Hahaha :)

Re: Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

#9

Post by petercooper »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #4

Tangentially on this note, if anyone is interested, I can produce a list of every RSS feed known to the marginalia search crawler. It's a pretty noisy list, but any thing I can do to help the spread, discovery and adoption of RSS I'm happy to help with so just let me know. I a tool in place to export this data to help power the experimental RSS preview feature[1], but haven't had the inspiration to do much with that…

I would be very keen to have access to that list and to, ideally, have a go at cleaning it up and producing a topical subset for broader use in certain fields I'm interested in (e.g. all the "developer blogs", say). I offer an OPML file of several hundred engineering/dev related blogs at https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ but I'm starting to think a little bigger.

Re: Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds

#10

Post by cykros »

keepamovin wrote: post #8
tl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be 2005 when Google Reader launched. RSS for people who didn't know what RSS was.

No, I mean: "Google" moment as in what Google originally was. Let me rephrase in edit my original comment to "Google Search" moment. Basically, when Google came on the scene in 1997, it blew away Yahoo Directory. Do I have my dates right? Hahaha :)

RSS if anything is in decline, rather than its ascent, because of the fact that in many ways it offers access to content in a way that diminishes ad views.

It's not impossible that it could come back from this state, and indeed, outside of this issue, there's nothing wrong with it as a system, and podcasts make heavy use of it. But it's worth being aware of this headwind.

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