7 ms·

Feedle: A search engine for blogs and podcasts

292 points by microflash 3y ago

fabianholzer 3y ago
Cool idea, I like that you can follow the queries as feed. The crux will be maintaining a well-curated/reviewed list of feeds. Also: the submit form seems to be broken - leads to the landing page of some form builder saas.
bsmth 3y ago
That's quite cool. How are feeds added? Is it all manual curation and submissions?
- microflash 3y ago
  There's a link in the header to submit your own feed. Sadly that link didn't work for me.
  - popey 3y ago
    Seems fixed now, I just submitted a podcast feed.
  - p5v 3y ago
    It's a known issue for a portion of our visitors, which we are working on. For the time being, you can use the direct link to the form: https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7 https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7
yakkomajuri 3y ago
This is in some ways similar to something I built recently: https://app.recessfeed.com/ https://app.recessfeed.com/ We seem to have similar ideas, so would love to have a chat! This line aligns a lot with what I have in mind: "Discover content creators you may not know about"
hexage1814 3y ago
It's a cool idea but I really don't like the front-end being used in the site. For instance, if you try to select the footer element, to block it, instead of the site showing you "#footer" (or something legible), it shows you something like ".lg\:px-8.sm\:px-6.px-4.max-w-7xl.mx-auto > .py-16". As well as it adding a "?ref=feedle.world" in all links you click by default. Also it would be nice an option that automatically loads more when you scroll down. Oh, and that "Welcome to feedle!" popup seems like dark pattern to me.
- SamWhited 3y ago
  I would have said the same thing about infinite scrolling; that always feels like a dark pattern to me because it makes it hard to find specific results again, hard (or impossible) to get to any links in the page footer, etc. I always just want a single page that I can link back to later :)
  - hexage1814 3y ago
    To me, I think it depends on what is the goal when you are searching something and what is that data in particular. Infinite scroll and pagination offer different user experience proposes, and make different assumptions about the user. To give a blatant example where I don't see a pagination system making that much sense, pagination on a personalized news feed of some social media. That information is changing constantly. It's a never-ending information stream. Even in the case here, if you are searching for a blog or podcast, you could just link that blog article rather than the page search where you found that article. Especially in a situation where you don't have any interaction with that content aside clicking on it. Especially when the search engine doesn't seem to have millions of results, which seems to be the case here, it seems to be a relatively small list of blogs submitted to this site. Infinite scroll on the other hand have some problems especially in situations where you are expect to interact with that content one way or the other (such as a commentary section). In fact, when dealing with really large amounts of data, it essentially buries that data. Think about a commentary section with 60.000 commentaries. Essentially 98% of them are hidden way because the browser will crash before loading them. So if you decide to go down infinite scroll route, I think the very least you could do would be offer another way to search for stuff, such as search option inside the commentary section (although nobody does that). But I think a pagination system would be better in that situation. Anyway, just some food for thoughts.
robrenaud 3y ago
What kind of queries do you handle well? Do you index podcast transcripts?
msmarvel 3y ago
Cool idea, does a blog need to be submitted? There's a movie blog I didn't see in the search
- BadHumans 3y ago
  There's a submit button in the header. Top right on desktop.
culopatin 3y ago
The icon color and name made me think this was Feedly not Feedle, took a moment to understand they were unrelated
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
culopatin 3y ago
Could be nice to have an “I’m feeling lucky”
- miniman1337 3y ago
  stumbleupon 2.0
  - culopatin 3y ago
    Same as high waisted wide jeans, everything is coming back
- p5v 3y ago
  It's very high on our list. Optimistically, we are going to release that feature by the end of next week.
- Kalabasa 3y ago
  https://indieblog.page/random https://indieblog.page/random Something similar
Redster 3y ago
Thanks so much for building this. Very cool. In addition, making clear that the feeds are embeddable in Obsidian is just great. Will see how well this searches and will start using today!
Redster 3y ago
What are you using to index the blogs and podcasts?
- Redster 3y ago
  And do you permit people to submit blogs and podcasts that they don't own? That's unclear at the moment.
mdaniel 3y ago
damn shame there doesn't seem to be a search facet for saying "only podcasts" since I don't need another search engine for webpages
iLoveOncall 3y ago
The link to submit a new blog or podcast doesn't work, it redirects to the homepage of a form builder service.
- p5v 3y ago
  It's a known issue for a portion of our visitors, which we are working on. For the time being, you can use the direct link to the form: https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7 https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7
horsh1 3y ago
As with the majority of the recent search startups: no hiragana, no hebrew, no cyrillic.
- p5v 3y ago
  Co-creator here: we have multi-language support on the backend site, but it is still in a bit of an experimental stage at the moment. Not all posts are being attributed the right language, so we are still experimenting there. For the time being, EN-language blogs are our first priority. That said, we will beta-launch the multi-language support very soon.
rubymamis 3y ago
Found some interesting blog posts using this, thanks!
Vox_Leone 3y ago
The world needs blogs, repositories of long-form original thinking on the Internet. As a blogger I appreciate the opportunity to place my link. I salute your initiative and wish you success!
- samstave 3y ago
  True, And it will be great when a service such as this has a auto-crawler, categorizer LLM that takes all the content in the repo and groups them together based on content context tagging - so a diasproa of blog posts from anyone/where about [TOPIC] could be groupded, and even compared... "Show me all the blog posts on [TOPIC] but show me the top opposing opinions on said [TOPIC]" Or "show me all the folks who have consensus on [SUBJECT]" etc.
  - Redster 3y ago
    That sounds very useful. I wonder if that might be more in the wheel house of a search engine like the folks at Kagi? I'm trying to think of what is the closest thing to this that exists.
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    Gather what properties you can dissect, sort the props of the search results by how many share them, display the most frequent x with a more button.
- codazoda 3y ago
  The “Submit” link just takes me to the Tally home page. I wonder if the link is broken of if they exceeded a limit.
  - codazoda 3y ago
    This is a known bug. There are form links elsewhere in these comments.
- monksy 3y ago
  I agree with you.. but there is a lot of issues related to blogging that has caused it's decline in popularity. (I.e. content aggrigation, cross connection social comment features, reduction of spam in discovering/blog reputation, etc) For me I have a blog but I'm struggling to write for it because I don't have an audience that makes the blog valuable for me.
littlestymaar 3y ago
Since the creators are here: how are you going to defend against SEO spam? Curation when adding the blog to the index wont work as anyone could make a reasonable-looking blog with AI generated articles in just a few hours and after you've added it to the index push a ton of aggressive spam.
drewolbrich 3y ago
I'd like to submit my blog, but I can't. The "Submit your blog or podcast" button at the top of the page takes me to an advertisement for an unrelated website.
- jimkleiber 3y ago
  I found the answer in a different reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801350
john-tells-all 3y ago
I adore the idea of a podcast/blog search engine! And results can be streamed via RSS, wonderful! I use Feedly to subscribe to important RSS feeds, including specific Hacker News authors. Current database is a bit light: it didn't have "Science Vs", a popular podcast. Added. For comparison, https://www.podchaser.com/ https://www.podchaser.com/ only has podcasts but it's more fleshed out.
- unsungNovelty 3y ago
  I highly recommend https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/ It's open and can be used by many. It has all the podcast I need. It also powers a lot of open source podcast apps like https://antennapod.org/ https://antennapod.org/
messiah_complex 3y ago
To the creators: I've already read three very interesting blog posts that I never would have read otherwise. Well done.
azhenley 3y ago
Minor feedback: After doing a search with 0 results, there is a "load more" button that doesn't do anything.
treetalker 3y ago
Awesome project, thanks for putting it together and sharing it with us! A suggestion: allow users to flag dead links for removal. I searched for “task management”. One or more results led to pages that are 404/no longer exist. I’d like to help you remove those results. My suggestion seems appropriate because users add Feedle’s links in the first place.
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  internet archive links
  - treetalker 3y ago
    Thank you, although I know how to access the links through an archive service if I want to. My point was different: dead links are cluttering up the search results (and therefore the RSS). It would be nice to flag them for removal (or if the service removed dead links programmatically). As an aside for the developers, I find that the searches contain a lot of noise. (For instance, a search for OmniFocus turns up results from several sites that only contain summaries of release notes for minor versions of the app.)
gtirloni 3y ago
A search for "Kubernetes" shows a ton of corporate "blogs".
pncnmnp 3y ago
A bit tangential, I understand that Google is not well-received, and rightly so in some regards. However, has anyone been using something like this with Google: "<search-terms> site:blogpost.com OR site:github.io OR site:wordpress.com OR site:medium.com OR site:substack.com"? And occasionally throwing in reddit.com and news.ycombinator.com as well. Google seems to be slightly biased towards github.io and medium.com, but I've quite recently found that it is a great way to browse the web. The above search command is similar to what these niche search engines are doing but gets much more diverse results. Sure, it is likely to miss certain niche blogs. However, this is where adding site:news.ycombinator.com comes to the rescue - good niche blog posts are highly likely to eventually appear here. It is far from a panacea, but I have found the experience to be quite decent. I have this command lying around in my shell and notes, so I just copy-paste it and add on to it.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  > However, has anyone been using something like this with Google: "<search-terms> site:blogpost.com OR site:github.io OR site:wordpress.com OR site:medium.com OR site:substack.com"? Besides the privacy aspect of the service, this is almost the whole value prop of Kagi: you can mark certain sites as ranking higher, lower, or banishing them from your results entirely. I never thought I'd stop using Google but I've become a happy Kagi customer.
- account42 3y ago
  Why would you explicitly ask google to only include the low value blog hosts?
himujjal 3y ago
I dont know if you want to monetize this. But I suggest make it open source. You will receive tons of improvements and updates. I love this idea!
casey2 3y ago
Is there a search engine for search engines yet?
hipparchus 3y ago
I must confess the results don't seem too relevant for my first search: as I recently lost a family member to it, I searched "philosophy suicide", and got the following: * Post-Human Capitalism and Revolution: Detroit and Blade Runner 2049 * The voice in your head: How a movement of people who hear voices is reshaping our understanding of mental illness – and consciousness itself. * The Ghosts of Mark Fisher * The radicalism of Randolph Bourne: Bourne’s affinity with outsiders drove his vision of making North America a united states of communities. A century on, his writings have become more relevant than ever * Is the quest for immortality worse than death? * The Dangers of Meritocracy So far only the 4th result seems more than just tangentially relevant, and I know of much more relevant mainstream podcast episodes specifically dealing with the philosophy of suicide, but none of those seem to come up.
p5v 3y ago
Hello everyone, co-creator of Feedle here. Thank you so much for letting the world know about our tiny side project! While I tred answering some of people's pressing questions on this thread, I think they deserved a more thorough explanation, so I wrote a blog post instead: https://preslav.me/2024/03/25/feedle-on-the-hacker-news-front-page/ https://preslav.me/2024/03/25/feedle-on-the-hacker-news-fron... Beweare, it's a bit lengthy, but hopefully, it would address some of your concerns and feedback. You can always reach out to me and the team with ideas and suggestions. Cheers!
0pteron 3y ago
This is surprisingly useful. I was trying to find a very specific podcast about a type of data algorithm and google podcast search just recommended me the wrong type of podcast or couldn't find any. Tried this and it found 9 podcasts that matched what I was after. Edit: OK they were all articles and not podcasts, so it's possible no one has a podcast about it, but this is still useful

292 points by microflash 3y ago

Cool idea, I like that you can follow the queries as feed. The crux will be maintaining a well-curated/reviewed list of feeds. Also: the submit form seems to be broken - leads to the landing page of some form builder saas.

bsmth 3y ago

That's quite cool. How are feeds added? Is it all manual curation and submissions?

microflash 3y ago
There's a link in the header to submit your own feed. Sadly that link didn't work for me.
- popey 3y ago
  Seems fixed now, I just submitted a podcast feed.
- p5v 3y ago
  It's a known issue for a portion of our visitors, which we are working on. For the time being, you can use the direct link to the form: https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7 https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7

yakkomajuri 3y ago

This is in some ways similar to something I built recently: https://app.recessfeed.com/ https://app.recessfeed.com/ We seem to have similar ideas, so would love to have a chat! This line aligns a lot with what I have in mind: "Discover content creators you may not know about"

hexage1814 3y ago

It's a cool idea but I really don't like the front-end being used in the site. For instance, if you try to select the footer element, to block it, instead of the site showing you "#footer" (or something legible), it shows you something like ".lg\:px-8.sm\:px-6.px-4.max-w-7xl.mx-auto > .py-16". As well as it adding a "?ref=feedle.world" in all links you click by default. Also it would be nice an option that automatically loads more when you scroll down. Oh, and that "Welcome to feedle!" popup seems like dark pattern to me.

SamWhited 3y ago
I would have said the same thing about infinite scrolling; that always feels like a dark pattern to me because it makes it hard to find specific results again, hard (or impossible) to get to any links in the page footer, etc. I always just want a single page that I can link back to later :)
- hexage1814 3y ago
  To me, I think it depends on what is the goal when you are searching something and what is that data in particular. Infinite scroll and pagination offer different user experience proposes, and make different assumptions about the user. To give a blatant example where I don't see a pagination system making that much sense, pagination on a personalized news feed of some social media. That information is changing constantly. It's a never-ending information stream. Even in the case here, if you are searching for a blog or podcast, you could just link that blog article rather than the page search where you found that article. Especially in a situation where you don't have any interaction with that content aside clicking on it. Especially when the search engine doesn't seem to have millions of results, which seems to be the case here, it seems to be a relatively small list of blogs submitted to this site. Infinite scroll on the other hand have some problems especially in situations where you are expect to interact with that content one way or the other (such as a commentary section). In fact, when dealing with really large amounts of data, it essentially buries that data. Think about a commentary section with 60.000 commentaries. Essentially 98% of them are hidden way because the browser will crash before loading them. So if you decide to go down infinite scroll route, I think the very least you could do would be offer another way to search for stuff, such as search option inside the commentary section (although nobody does that). But I think a pagination system would be better in that situation. Anyway, just some food for thoughts.

robrenaud 3y ago

What kind of queries do you handle well? Do you index podcast transcripts?

msmarvel 3y ago

Cool idea, does a blog need to be submitted? There's a movie blog I didn't see in the search

BadHumans 3y ago
There's a submit button in the header. Top right on desktop.

culopatin 3y ago

The icon color and name made me think this was Feedly not Feedle, took a moment to understand they were unrelated

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

culopatin 3y ago

Could be nice to have an “I’m feeling lucky”

miniman1337 3y ago
stumbleupon 2.0
- culopatin 3y ago
  Same as high waisted wide jeans, everything is coming back
p5v 3y ago
It's very high on our list. Optimistically, we are going to release that feature by the end of next week.
Kalabasa 3y ago
https://indieblog.page/random https://indieblog.page/random Something similar

Redster 3y ago

Thanks so much for building this. Very cool. In addition, making clear that the feeds are embeddable in Obsidian is just great. Will see how well this searches and will start using today!

Redster 3y ago

What are you using to index the blogs and podcasts?

Redster 3y ago
And do you permit people to submit blogs and podcasts that they don't own? That's unclear at the moment.

mdaniel 3y ago

damn shame there doesn't seem to be a search facet for saying "only podcasts" since I don't need another search engine for webpages

iLoveOncall 3y ago

The link to submit a new blog or podcast doesn't work, it redirects to the homepage of a form builder service.

p5v 3y ago
It's a known issue for a portion of our visitors, which we are working on. For the time being, you can use the direct link to the form: https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7 https://tally.so/r/mJ11E7

horsh1 3y ago

As with the majority of the recent search startups: no hiragana, no hebrew, no cyrillic.

p5v 3y ago
Co-creator here: we have multi-language support on the backend site, but it is still in a bit of an experimental stage at the moment. Not all posts are being attributed the right language, so we are still experimenting there. For the time being, EN-language blogs are our first priority. That said, we will beta-launch the multi-language support very soon.

rubymamis 3y ago

Found some interesting blog posts using this, thanks!

Vox_Leone 3y ago

The world needs blogs, repositories of long-form original thinking on the Internet. As a blogger I appreciate the opportunity to place my link. I salute your initiative and wish you success!

samstave 3y ago
True, And it will be great when a service such as this has a auto-crawler, categorizer LLM that takes all the content in the repo and groups them together based on content context tagging - so a diasproa of blog posts from anyone/where about [TOPIC] could be groupded, and even compared... "Show me all the blog posts on [TOPIC] but show me the top opposing opinions on said [TOPIC]" Or "show me all the folks who have consensus on [SUBJECT]" etc.
- Redster 3y ago
  That sounds very useful. I wonder if that might be more in the wheel house of a search engine like the folks at Kagi? I'm trying to think of what is the closest thing to this that exists.
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  Gather what properties you can dissect, sort the props of the search results by how many share them, display the most frequent x with a more button.
codazoda 3y ago
The “Submit” link just takes me to the Tally home page. I wonder if the link is broken of if they exceeded a limit.
- codazoda 3y ago
  This is a known bug. There are form links elsewhere in these comments.
monksy 3y ago
I agree with you.. but there is a lot of issues related to blogging that has caused it's decline in popularity. (I.e. content aggrigation, cross connection social comment features, reduction of spam in discovering/blog reputation, etc) For me I have a blog but I'm struggling to write for it because I don't have an audience that makes the blog valuable for me.

littlestymaar 3y ago

Since the creators are here: how are you going to defend against SEO spam? Curation when adding the blog to the index wont work as anyone could make a reasonable-looking blog with AI generated articles in just a few hours and after you've added it to the index push a ton of aggressive spam.

drewolbrich 3y ago

I'd like to submit my blog, but I can't. The "Submit your blog or podcast" button at the top of the page takes me to an advertisement for an unrelated website.

jimkleiber 3y ago
I found the answer in a different reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801350

john-tells-all 3y ago

I adore the idea of a podcast/blog search engine! And results can be streamed via RSS, wonderful! I use Feedly to subscribe to important RSS feeds, including specific Hacker News authors. Current database is a bit light: it didn't have "Science Vs", a popular podcast. Added. For comparison, https://www.podchaser.com/ https://www.podchaser.com/ only has podcasts but it's more fleshed out.

unsungNovelty 3y ago
I highly recommend https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/ It's open and can be used by many. It has all the podcast I need. It also powers a lot of open source podcast apps like https://antennapod.org/ https://antennapod.org/

messiah_complex 3y ago

To the creators: I've already read three very interesting blog posts that I never would have read otherwise. Well done.

azhenley 3y ago

Minor feedback: After doing a search with 0 results, there is a "load more" button that doesn't do anything.

treetalker 3y ago

Awesome project, thanks for putting it together and sharing it with us! A suggestion: allow users to flag dead links for removal. I searched for “task management”. One or more results led to pages that are 404/no longer exist. I’d like to help you remove those results. My suggestion seems appropriate because users add Feedle’s links in the first place.

throwaway14356 3y ago
internet archive links
- treetalker 3y ago
  Thank you, although I know how to access the links through an archive service if I want to. My point was different: dead links are cluttering up the search results (and therefore the RSS). It would be nice to flag them for removal (or if the service removed dead links programmatically). As an aside for the developers, I find that the searches contain a lot of noise. (For instance, a search for OmniFocus turns up results from several sites that only contain summaries of release notes for minor versions of the app.)

gtirloni 3y ago

A search for "Kubernetes" shows a ton of corporate "blogs".

pncnmnp 3y ago

A bit tangential, I understand that Google is not well-received, and rightly so in some regards. However, has anyone been using something like this with Google: "<search-terms> site:blogpost.com OR site:github.io OR site:wordpress.com OR site:medium.com OR site:substack.com"? And occasionally throwing in reddit.com and news.ycombinator.com as well. Google seems to be slightly biased towards github.io and medium.com, but I've quite recently found that it is a great way to browse the web. The above search command is similar to what these niche search engines are doing but gets much more diverse results. Sure, it is likely to miss certain niche blogs. However, this is where adding site:news.ycombinator.com comes to the rescue - good niche blog posts are highly likely to eventually appear here. It is far from a panacea, but I have found the experience to be quite decent. I have this command lying around in my shell and notes, so I just copy-paste it and add on to it.

bastawhiz 3y ago
> However, has anyone been using something like this with Google: "<search-terms> site:blogpost.com OR site:github.io OR site:wordpress.com OR site:medium.com OR site:substack.com"? Besides the privacy aspect of the service, this is almost the whole value prop of Kagi: you can mark certain sites as ranking higher, lower, or banishing them from your results entirely. I never thought I'd stop using Google but I've become a happy Kagi customer.
account42 3y ago
Why would you explicitly ask google to only include the low value blog hosts?

himujjal 3y ago

I dont know if you want to monetize this. But I suggest make it open source. You will receive tons of improvements and updates. I love this idea!

casey2 3y ago

Is there a search engine for search engines yet?

hipparchus 3y ago

I must confess the results don't seem too relevant for my first search: as I recently lost a family member to it, I searched "philosophy suicide", and got the following: * Post-Human Capitalism and Revolution: Detroit and Blade Runner 2049 * The voice in your head: How a movement of people who hear voices is reshaping our understanding of mental illness – and consciousness itself. * The Ghosts of Mark Fisher * The radicalism of Randolph Bourne: Bourne’s affinity with outsiders drove his vision of making North America a united states of communities. A century on, his writings have become more relevant than ever * Is the quest for immortality worse than death? * The Dangers of Meritocracy So far only the 4th result seems more than just tangentially relevant, and I know of much more relevant mainstream podcast episodes specifically dealing with the philosophy of suicide, but none of those seem to come up.

p5v 3y ago

Hello everyone, co-creator of Feedle here. Thank you so much for letting the world know about our tiny side project! While I tred answering some of people's pressing questions on this thread, I think they deserved a more thorough explanation, so I wrote a blog post instead: https://preslav.me/2024/03/25/feedle-on-the-hacker-news-front-page/ https://preslav.me/2024/03/25/feedle-on-the-hacker-news-fron... Beweare, it's a bit lengthy, but hopefully, it would address some of your concerns and feedback. You can always reach out to me and the team with ideas and suggestions. Cheers!

0pteron 3y ago

This is surprisingly useful. I was trying to find a very specific podcast about a type of data algorithm and google podcast search just recommended me the wrong type of podcast or couldn't find any. Tried this and it found 9 podcasts that matched what I was after. Edit: OK they were all articles and not podcasts, so it's possible no one has a podcast about it, but this is still useful