Relevant to You? : searchMacros

1 Degree from Chris Pirillo

andyed — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:04:00 GMT

One of my more fanciful macro creations as I experimented with LinkFromDomain over the last few weeks was a 7 degrees inspired hack using Seattle internet poster boy Chris Pirillo.

Macro:andyed.aintNobodyIfYouAintPirillo restricts matches to content linked by one of Pirillo's sites. So, Scoble is still the #1 Robert, but musician Robert Burns and artist Robert Wilson take a backseat to geeks Robert Scales and Robert McLaws.

I'm not a contender for the top Andy, where Chris trades Warhol for Hertzfield, but I am in the game. Test your Pirillo connectivity with the form below (or click through from your aggregator) by entering your name and/or site in the form below.

Don't have a link from Chris Pirillo?

You ain't nobody

Vote on this macro at the gallery.

Search Macros Recap: DiggRank and the Power of Trusted Networks

andyed — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:00:00 GMT

In case you couldn't tell, in microsoftie speak, I'm super excited about (advanced) search macros. I've created about 50 macros, the best of which I selected for the macro directory on this site. Almost all of these macros feature LinkFromDomain heavily.

Significant portions of my work experience since '96 have involved doing SEO, and I'm jazzed that the search engine community is appreciating the Live Search syntax for their assessment purposes. However, that's mising the really interesting and important point here.

Search Macros vs Rollyo/Sites Search
Macros are often compared to Rollyo or other site bundling search offerings, but I hope the blog post describing LinkFromDomain, LinkDomain, and featuring other operators, sets the record straight. Defining a set of sites to search is cool, and an idea well due to be commonly available. To be fair, Rollyo's UI and integration is slick, but Micah Alpern hacked up a search of his blog, the blogs he linked to, or the web at large with a Google API hack back in 2003!

Using the link domain operators, you can go well beyond a simple set of sites. You can:

keep a living list of the sites that link to you and search them
keep a living list of the sites you link to and search them
do the same for a set of trusted sites

Access to other advanced syntax differentiates further from simple site search amalgamations. Heck, Scoble pontificated about a search engine that excluded blogs that participate in pay per post. While I didn't figure out a way to focus this on only those PPP bloggers who don't disclose their interest, I think it's impressive that the basics can be done at all. It's called macro:andyed.realBloggers, and uses -inbody:counttrackula.com to exclude sites that use the PPP tracking script (I think!) and hasfeed: to restrict to blogs (or other pages with syndication).

Super Hubs: DiggRank
The promise of personal networks of trust in information retrieval is not fully realized by the macros offering, but it's an important step in the right direction. For super-hubs, like Digg or Delicious, linkFromDomain captures some really interesting human attentional residue.

Let me introduce macro:andyed.DiggRank. Try it for:

If you'd prefer to diversify from Digg, try macro:andyed.popularRank which maps from delicious, digg, stumbleupon, reddit, wink, and rojo:

This isn't just site search :)

One more example: there's a classic set of works by John Brunner that neatly fit into the cyberpunk genre, but predate the 80s rise of writers like Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson. My macro:andyed.cyberpunk nails the simple query John Brunner and provides the perfect background for my previous sentence. While wikipedia dominates page 1, note the diversity of domains returned on page 2 and beyond. Only 7 domains were programmed into the macro, but they're used as jumping points to create a search set of 10,000 pages.

Live Search OPML Generator: Bootstrap Your Blogosphere Engagement

andyed — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 07:39:00 GMT

What does it do?: This app runs your query against the Live Search API with the feed: syntax, returning RSS feeds, and assembles an OPML file. You'll get the chance to choose from the results before generating the subscription list.

What is OPML?: An XML format commonly used for managing subscriptions to RSS feeds in readers known as aggregators. Typically, you'll find an import command in your aggregator where you can browse to a .opml.

What can I use it for?

Startup a Blog reading list: Subscribing to blogs is not as easy as it could be and can be time consuming. Bootstrap your blog subscription with this tool.
Subscribe to a community: By crafting a careful query, you can get an instant RSS synch with a whole community of bloggers.
Watch bloggers reactions: Enable comments to get specific blog post comment feeds to track what bloggers are saying about your topic of interest.

Try it out at http://surfmind.com/lab/msn/opml/

Wait until I tell you about combining this with macros! We've just posted the official blog post describing macros V2, following up on a core developer's account from a few weeks ago. There's still more to come.

There's another interesting extension to this technique -- creating a reading list from a search. Reading lists are groups of RSS feeds you can subscribe to, allowing the creator of the reading list to edit the list and you to get the updated feeds automagically. While support is limited across readers right now, it's a very cool idea. I'm not quite ready to invite a world of aggregators to ping my server regularly to get updates; perhaps someone out there is? The Live Search API is available!