If Google could provide this for free for 8 years, surely the smart folks at NewsBlur could spin up a big data cluster and figure out how to make this work for paying clients. Heck, I’d pay twice as much as I’m currently paying NB for a premium service which allowed me to search feeds I’d subscribed to.
Please bring full search across all feeds. I use search usually to dig up something i’ve read to give it to others. Per-feed search probably won’t help at all. For server loads, I think it’s fair to block free users from intensive operations.
No one searches his feeds all the time. However, when he/she needs it, it usually means that piece of information is important for him now. Saved stories might catch some of these situations, but you won’t know ahead of time what might be useful several days later.
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great! i’d rather have the search before the iPhone app, but I guess I’m in the minority…
We’d pay more for search. Could you shorten the development time by buying one of Google’s search appliances? Ironic I know but search is the best way to find an article in a massive feed like The Verge. (If The Verge and all other large sites would provide separate feeds for reviews, videos, etc., search would be less important but still good to have.)
This is exactly how I feel, and how would use search as well: something I know I’ve read in the past but want to find again for my own benefit or to share with others. I often don’t remember what feed it came from, or if I shared it or not.
If search ended up being limited to just shared items, I would basically end up sharing everything even remotely interesting so I could have assurance I’d be able to find it in the future.
Searching only for things I designate as interesting in the past is pointless to how I use the product.
If I want to see what my feeds have said about a topic that just came acrossmy radar recently, searching starred posts is useless. If I want to search my deal sites for a something I just discovered I need, searching flagged posts is of no use. If I remembered reading about something, but don’t remember where, and I didn’t find it interesting enough to flag at the time… I’m out of luck. I’m sure searching for starred, bookmarked, whatever posts is useful to others, but not really for me.
Search is good at broad, fuzzy information discovery. Limiting it to stuff I have already categorized is kind of beside the point. If I already categorized it, I wouldn’t really need search, unless I categorized more things than I can reasonably sift through, which would be contrary to the point of categorization.
What I would like is being able to search stories that I’ve “tagged.” I’m not sure if you have a tagged feature, but I GReader I used to tag all stories that I thought I would want to read later or refer to later. I could bring them up quickly just by doing a keyword search, even if I couldn’t remember where I read them.
Doing a search by feed, If I remembered where I read it in the first place, I’d just go to that website and search there.
Have you considered http://www.elasticsearch.org/ to implement search?
Full feed search is main missing feature in Newsblur for me. My use case is that I read something, and then a few days later I want to refer someone else to it, but it can be incredible hard to find (don’t remember what day I read it, or which feed). Searching only saved articles wouldn’t be helpful to me, as I never save articles (though perhaps I’d start saving articles if it’s something I’m even mildly interested in, just to make sure I could search them later).
The more I have switched everything over to Newsblur (starting with just a few feeds but for the last couple of months, have everything I read in it), the more I realize just how much search is necessary. I read 100+ articles a day from probably 50+ feeds (these are just the new articles that come in…I have triple that number for total feeds), and I’m sure I’m there are many whose statistics are much more compelling than mine.
The point I’m trying to make is that it is unfeasible to go back and look for an article a week or so later when I’m trying to remember it. My reader isn’t just a “read and forget” place to get all my info; it’s very much a “memory bank” that I want to retrieve from. And judging by all the comments/interest in this topic, I’m sure I’m not alone.
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^^^ What he said.
You are always posting cool technical info about development on newsblur, I’d love to read a post about what it would take to add search
I am a premium account holder, and I think that if you offer the feature, it should be for premium accounts (given the massive engineering effort), but that is has to operate across all subscribed feeds, not just single feeds or saved stores. That was the single most powerful feature of Google Reader, and it would be a shame to see any other free service offer such functionality before a premium service like Newsblur is able to offer it.
Search is critical to power users. And when many free alternatives to NewsBlur offer search capabilities that are not available to paying users of NewsBlur, something is very wrong. I would upgrade to premium for this functionality, but I won’t pay anything to *not* have it.
Another option is Apache Pig + Hadoop. Big data isn’t as hard as it used to be.
C’mon NewsBlur, Feedspot is eating your lunch on this issue. 
I needed search of my saved items (1100+) today. Really missed it. Seems like a nice to have until you need it and then }[##{*{+}{#>|€ !
Searching of feeds is nice … If you have the NSA, oops I mean Google’s, infrastructure. Searching saved items is the 90% case, at least for those of us who save items. Please, I am begging you.
I have not used the service you linked to above, but this is exactly what I predicted in an above post. If NewsBlur does not enable this feature, a competitor will (and appears like they might have).
I’ve been giving *six* options a test run while I try to decide on one, and NewsBlur is the *only* one of the six that doesn’t have search, and the other five are all freebies. This is why I don’t understand why this is such a challenge. After all, if it is that complicated to set up, then why do so many other free options already offer it?
It’s called priorities. Samuel wisely spent the last few months beefing up the infrastructure. Have you noticed that NewsBlur is almost instantaneous? Obviously, there’s something about NewsBlur you like or else you wouldn’t bother complaining and instead switch to one of the free services. I myself would like some features but I voice them in a friendly tone and in the meantime am sticking with NewsBlur because of its founder and because it has venture capital, which all of the other services will need whether they know it or not. Google Reader gave advanced notice. That won’t happen when some of the startups go belly up in 6-12 months.