Search function?

The ability to search multiple feeds is the feature I most want in a feed reader. It doesn’t have to be all feeds (although that would be nice), but at least a subset of feeds. A common use case for me is searching feeds from multiple journals for several keywords. This might be 20-30 feeds so searching them one by one would be time consuming. Generally this would be for a project of limited duration or to answer a specific question. This is different from training feeds on a set of topics that you regularly want to see.

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I agree on 100%! For monitoring purposes and following hundreds of feeds, such a search function is clearly a must!
The (only?) missing functionality on a platform I do not hesitate to recommend to my colleagues and friends! :wink:

I can’t even describe how disappointing it is that NewsBlur doesn’t contain functionality to search feeds. Coming from GR and several aggregators before it, I thought this function was a basic commodity and blindly put down my cash for the premium service because I have a lot of feeds. Imagine my surprise that the search doesn’t exist. I absolutely have a responsibility to understand a tool before paying for it and will take that accountability, but expecting a search function seems pretty reasonable to me. I’ve now been a paid subscriber of NewsBlur for a week now and am seriously thinking about a prorated refund.

Is there a timeline for this functionality to be added?

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+1

@Jamil Ben Alluch: Come on. :slight_smile: Mr. Clay is working day and night. $36 would be a bargain even if Newsblur had half the features it currently has. It’s a one man show. And there are more pressing problems with so many Google Reader expats joining Newsblur. Please be nice. :slight_smile:

@Samual Clay: Thank you for all your efforts and the amazingly fast replies on Get Satisfaction!

Jamil, what do you mean you’re not getting your money’s worth. It was spelled out before you paid. If you didn’t like what was available today, then you have the option of not paying for the service.

And as I mentioned elsewhere, drag-and-drop was removed because it kept causing people to accidentally drag their feeds into the wrong place. This is not Windows Explorer. You are constantly interacting with the feed list.

Samuel, I absolutely appreciate the time you’ve put into this project and I do take the blame for not fully understanding its capabilities before paying for the service, but a search function is such a fundamental and basic feature that should be looked at as a necessity. I understand the timeline you’ve set forth with search, but it appears feed wide searching is not in the cards. As much as I enjoy the things NewsBlur does do properly, the lack of this feature is the reason I am forced to cancel my premium membership with you and move on.

Really? I guess I need to spend my money elsewhere.

thanks, saved storied search is enough for me

Same for me. Or maybe you could implement a third-party app/function?
NewsBlur is great. However, search or filter function is the last, but tremendously crucial masterpiece that needs to be added any time soon.

@Jamil surely with all your degrees you can see that adding a search function has huge implications…caching and indexing all fetched stories…forever.

That being said, I do sorely miss the search function I had in GR. Maybe a tiered membership plan could support it, and an add-on option?

@Jamil: Seeing as you have so much expertise, and know exactly what it takes to support search on feeds, I invite you to visit [https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur], fork the repository, and implement search. Several people above have expressed interest in the feature, you could even stand up a host with your fork, and make that $36 back.

I built the front-end for search a while back. It’s enabled for admin accounts (and I can search my own saved stories), but it doesn’t scale and is enormously expensive. I’ll get back to it soon enough.

Samuel, Jamil is obviously a little emotional and has some misdirected anger. He’s definitely not pursuing this in a productive way. Still, the basis of his argument shouldn’t be made any less invalid for it. Search is a necessity, no matter how difficult it may be to implement. When there are many other free alternatives out there such as The Good Reader that have this functionality implemented, it should be a given that your premium service contains it.

Thanks for listening.

EXACTLY !!!

but for today i’ll be happy if you just fix text view :frowning:

I’d like to throw my voice behind the need to have a comprehensive search feature in newsblur. I find myself pining for a search feature similar to what GReader had; A search across all my chosen feeds.

While I could adapt to NewsBlur and use something less than optimal, I feel as a paid user, this feature is important to me.

love,
shmoo

Wow. Just… wow. I mean, I’m here because I would love to have search as well. I mean, I’m looking right now for a posting to Oro’s blog that was oh sometime in the last two and a half years, about a record of Benin funk music, by a guy whose name doesn’t even appear in Google Search but once, and …

Yeah, I can see that the need for this is completely sporadic. Hopefully as sporadic as the total dooschitation (sic) displayed above. Hopefully he won’t come back to let us know how things are going for him (without an apology anyway)

P.S. If you have ANY PROBLEM getting my auto-renewal (wife lost credit card and it was replaced) contact me because your site is worth it to ME.

I bought my premium account assuming it would have this feature… It is such a basic thing, I figured there was no way it didn’t have it, I must just be using it wrong.

I now keep going back to Google Reader every time I want to search. Please put this to the top of the stack of features, this is a basic core necessity for a Reader replacement.

You’re never going to have this as a feature? I assumed it would be there, since, you know, it’s such a core feature for something that aggregates digital information.

The lack of the search function makes Newsblur worthless for me. I wasn’t clear when purchasing the premium option.

I have lots of feeds and news I would like to sort and filter.

Your “intelligence” does not help at all because:

  1. You can only filter key words in the headline and not in the text of the news; and
  2. The key word filters are attached to each feed and not to the overall collection of articles
    Correct me if I’m wrong.

Using ReadKit doesn’t help very much because their search functions are not complex enough (and slow for this volume I am using the reader for).

Currently I am using Netnewswire as a native OSX app which features all the above mentioned except for ongoing feed updates.

Newsblur has some very good ideas and functions built in, but it doesn’t solve my problems. 24 USD for nothing. Shame.

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