Chris Pirllo has done an excellent job putting together a meta search tool for RSS and tag searching. Gada.be is the name of his offering, and it pulls search results from over 140 sites which offer RSS feeds or APIs. Among the sites are Google News, Yahoo News, Flickr, Technorati, Google Blogs and so on. This is extremely convenient.
Gada.be is easy as all get out to remember, and is even ideal for conducting searches over mobile devices. Even sexier than being a meta search tool is a functionality which allows users to put their search terms into the URL when accessing gada.be. So, instead of going to the page, waiting for it to load and then entering your search term, you can enter the search term directly into the URL. For example:
This URL will return search results relevant to the word “Macintosh” from each of gade.be’s sources. This saves a lot of time on mobile devices and enables bloggers and others to incorporate standing searches into their blog pages.
On his blog entry on gada.be, Chris offerings the following guidance on syntax:
Those are two different URLs, each with a different set of results. A dot between two keywords implies a quoted statement, whereas a dash implies the AND operator.
At the moment it looks a little bit like the server might be suffering from its own success. Chris comments on his blog that improvements are in the works.
This is a very cool tool for those of us who use RSS and blogs for our research. Many thanks, Chris.
