After reading Scoble’s post asking about the SearchFox RSS reader, I thought it is time to write about my experience with the new personalized aggregator.
I am a beta user of SearchFox RSS reader for about two weeks. It is a personalized RSS aggregator which uses machine learning methods to learn about your feed reading habits and determine the topics and sources that you like the most. Then your feeds are prioritized depending on a score with the highest scored entry showing up on the first page and at the top of all the posts. So, posts from all your feeds are listed from highest score to the lowest score. Currently, SearchFox RSS reader does not take the popularity of a post in the SearchFox community into account when prioritizing the posts.
So, how well does it work? First off, it is a very early beta. I am not expecting too much from it yet. I am just happy that there is an effort in that direction. Now, as that is out of the way, I can say that it is not bad. Since I did not see an explanation of the calculation of the score, it is not perfectly how the post at the top of the list is there with that specific score. For example, this Neowin.net entry is at the top of my list at the moment with the score of 77.6 whereas another Neowin.net entry is second with 12.3 followed by this post from gapingvoid with a score of 11.0. My understanding is that Neowin is among is the sources I like, and Microsoft is in the topics I like and this combination puts two Microsoft related Neowin posts to the top of the list. They are followed by gapingvoid since it is also in source I like. What is interesting is that gapingvoid beats a Microsoft related post from InsideMicrosoft probably because InsideMicrosoft could not make it to the “sources I like” list. This is not a big deal since both are on the first page. There are some more Microsoft related posts on the second page probably because there are more of those that can be displayed on one page. Looks like Microsoft is the most dominant topic among my “Topics I like” list. This brings me one thing that I notice in “My Profile”.
On the left is the My Profile section. As you can see, there are phrases like “i, com, right, offers, is, now, sep” would potentially skew the result set. I am sure there will be improvements in that area in the near future. For example, this My Profile view was just recently introduced and it is definetely helping me to reason about the scores.
There is also the option of resetting personalization but I think this would be a very drastic thing if you have used SearchFox for sometime. I think a better way to give the user control over the feature set (this is what I chose to say about the “Topics I like” and “Sources I like”), is to make it possible to remove a specific feature from the set. I imagine a solution that Findory provides, which is removing a particular previously read article, is a better one. However, it would be more efficient for SearchFox to enable removal of features from the set instead of individuals posts.
Another thing that I should mention is that, you can mark each post as read/unread, or as a favourite and can email to a friend. SaearchFox RSS lets you see posts from last day, last week, last month or all the posts, or only the favourites. You can also perform batch operations on the displayed page like marking all posts as read/unread, save page as favourite, archive all, etc…A recently introduced feature lets you archieve all the pages.
One quick improvement that I would like to see is some control over when the feeds are updated. Because at this time, I cannot decide if there are new posts that I would be interested since most of the time, the posts at the top of the list are the one that I have already read. Now that I think of it, archiving some posts that I read may help on this. I will see how that works.
All in all, I am happy with SaearchFox RSS in its early days. I am sure it is going to be better since new features are introduced often, and Esteban Kozak is being close to the beta testers and is listening early feedback actively.
Go ahead and send an email to support@searchfox.com with your preferred username and you will most probably get an account in a short time.
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[...] I am sad to see such a promising service go dark. I had liked SearchFox RSS mainly because it was a hopeful solution to information flow coming with RSS subscriptions. For the curious reader out there, I had written a somewhat detailed review of SearchFox RSS back in September 2005. [...]
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