I don’t feel that anyone is unfairly complaining in this thread. I like NewsBlur, and am a premium subscriber, but that does mean I cannot offer constructive feedback on features which I (as a paying customer and power-user) consider to be of the utmost importance in this type of service. I think many others in this thread feel the same way, and based on replies, this appears to be the feature that a large portion of users would like at the top of the priority list.
I don’t believe that any premium subscriber would disagree that the architecture upgrades were the top priority. I feel the opinion (at least in this thread) is that the “power user” group would like the search functionality to be the next feature in-line.
I think some of the comments in this thread have an unnecessarily nasty tone. Our company has three accounts so does that make us triple power users? We’d like multiple account logins as the next feature but that seems unlikely.
Also, maybe I’m crazy but $24 per year seems too little for — let’s face it — a niche application that average consumers will never use. I consider NewsBlur more like a B2B application. We use it for our jobs. I get that many prosumers (myself included) also use RSS but prosumers have always paid more whether it’s cameras, cars, etc. Currently, there’s a land grab for customers. When the dust settles, I expect higher prices for these services.
For the record, I also miss search, agree that a search function should enable you to choose from everything, a folder, one feed, or your saved items.
When the dust settles, I suspect the price will rise as well. I would also be willing to pay a higher (to a point) subscription fee for NewsBlur if it were able to incorporate a fully operational “Google Reader” style search.
I think the perhaps-a-little indignant tone here is associated with how fundamental this issue is compared to any other. It’s about double it’s nearest competing feature on this board.
I did honestly buy your product thinking there would be search, since this product was touted everywhere as a substitute for Google Reader. So I felt a little shafted. A substitute for a Google product, without search, is no substitute. Yes, it’s my bad for buying a product based on an assumption, but at the same time you might be able to understand the frustration since the assumption was reasonable (at least to the 100+ people who voted on this thread).
I’d gladly pay US$10-15/month for the ability to search all my feeds, plus the ability to maintain a few “saved searches” for specific keywords. It’d even be OK if limited to the past 24 hours’ unread items.
OK, now that I am done being angry that I couldn’t get my work done, let me put this another way.
What, precisely, is the point of “Save this Story” if there is no search to find a particular saved story when you want it? If it’s merely “save so I can read it later today”, then OK, but that is surely not the only thing folks save stories for.
Look, if it weren’t for the complexities of managing a wide variety of feed formats and parsing them, I would be writing my own reader. Newsblur handles that stuff … the real hard part … very well. Thanks for that. The rest of it is merely a data management and scale problem, including search.
If I were to write my own reader, the scale problem goes away … I don’t need a server farm for just my own stuff. Then I could also dump the useless “intelligence” feature and instead have very nice keyword tagging and full text search … both are essential to the way I want to use an RSS reader.
I, too, feel foolish having paid for this thing and not looking close enough to find such a key mssing feature. Is it time to start looking again at other readers, or can we have an estimate of when we will get search?
That is not the functionality that most of the commenters are describing. We (or at least I) am describing the deep search functionality employed by Google Reader which ran across all feeds and all items at once (regardless of read or saved status.
Most people already know how to use the search built into their browser. I’m sure you meant well, but this isn’t what we want. Google isn’t the same as loading every page on the internet and using the find command in your browser.
I’ve been using NewsBlur (and paid for subscription) because it was one of the first alternatives to Reader I tried and I like it, but I’m now trying others because of the lack of search. Just paid for Feedspot, and have been using it so far today.
I don’t feel entitled to anything or demand that Samuel adds features I want, but (as a software developer myself) I hope Samuel appreciates his users telling him why they are switching to other products. Much better than just silently disappearing without him knowing why! The reason I’m even saying anything is because I like NewsBlur and would prefer to keep using it, if it had search.
Well worded, and I fully agree. Sadly I’m also looking at other options (ironically enough, Feedspot as well) but if/when search is added to NB (across all items; searching just saved items isn’t really a huge help to me), I’d come back. I paid for a membership here and would love to use it!
I’m not a programmer but I write functional specifications and work with programmers to implement my vision. Having built search into one of our services, my understanding is that basic search is not difficult. The issue is that thanks to Google, people want relevancy, not just hits sorted by date, etc. Thus, I suspect the issue here is fiscal (licensing a relevancy search engine equivalent to Google’s, which may require a Series A round) and/or engineering issues (beyond my pay grade). Regardless, not everyone here has search first on their wish list. First on my list is hiring someone away from Apple, Google, or somewhere else to work on user interface design, especially the iPad app. For example, every article should have a one-tap save icon to the left of the title and not require a menu drop-down. Second, multiple logins. So maybe the majority want search first but not everyone.
Do you mind if I ask what your tentative timeframe on releasing the saved/shared search feature might be? And if enhancing that search to all items in the future is on your list at some point in the future?
I have no plans for all items, although it’s on my future priority list. Saved and shared are coming up soon. I’m working on support all this week, iOS 7 and offline for iOS next week, and possibly starting search sometime next week. But I’ll warn you, this will be the fourth time I’ve attempted to build search. The first three times I failed. Interestingly, I still have the search UI (turned on only for admin) and it works just fine. It’s just searching an empty database. So at least the front-end is built. But the backend has always been the hard part.
No, I disagree with your comments on relevancy. More often I know the word or phrase that I want to search for and a simple list of the saved items where that word is found (in the feed, not necessarily the full text) would be sufficient for most of my searches. Often google will promote things based on “relevancy” when all I wanted was a reverse chrono list. That’s more often annoying than not. (A good reason to use DuckDuckGo or Yandex, btw.) If I wanted something fancier, I would probably use google on the web with some site hints to get their algorithms in play.
I agree completely with your GUI comments. Both iPad and Android interfaces could be better. I spent the last 5 days using those two exclusively (I am typing on a desktop now, thank heavens.) and I have to tell you that I was increasingly frustrated as time went on. The email integration is nice. The “page flip” to the browser view is nice. It should be easier to “open in the real browser” and other little things that continuous use reveals as irritating. Force the designers to use the iPad interface for a week, exclusively. If they don’t commit suicide, they will bring back lots of good improvements.
Your expectations are out of alignment. This is a news reader, not a venture funded startup. I did the design of the iPad, just as I’m working on search on the backend. If you want a venture-funded news reader, you have a couple options, but they are free and we all know what free gets us. It sounds like you would be happier with a refund, which I am pleased to give.
And Neil, this is not basic search. There’s hundreds of gigs of data, of which random parts change every single second (I fetch 70 feeds a second right now), and you need to re-index regularly. It is not a trivial problem and it makes your case weaker by implying that it is.
I should say also, by way of consolation, that I was more irritated by the Android Gmail app and the iPad Gmail and Google Maps app(s) than I was by NewsBlur. Some of my complaints stem from a common use case of mine … copy a link, an image, or a block of text and email it to a group of people. There are problems getting such things out of Newsblur and even bigger problems getting them into the email client(s) on both iPad and Android, with iPad being the worse of the two. Email from Newsblur doesn’t quite get it because it doesn’t support groups, although remembering the last to: list is a nice feature. (I don’t expect Newsblur to have groups, btw.) What I do expect is better cross-application support … a fool’s desire on the iPad, I know. It’s intended as a data presentation device … period. Thanks for your hard work on this. I can’t imagine how you get any real work done answering all these threads.
