RSS Search
Dave Aiello at CTDATA wrote about Unearthing Dirt in Weblogs Still a Black Art by Mark Glaser. Mark wants to search weblogs. How do you search weblogs? He wanted to search for Martin Sheen and he didn't want mainstream news articles. So he got on Daypop and searches for "Martin Sheen blog" in order to filter out the news sites! Maybe the pull-down menu on the front page was not a good design choice... There's also the link in the blue box at the right side of the screen to narrow your search! Narrow it to weblogs, news sites, headlines, narrow by language, sort by date and search only titles. There's the advanced search page for everything else. The point is: you can restrict searches to weblogs.
Dave then goes on to say an RSS based search engine for weblogs is needed. Daypop does this too. Check out the pull-down menu! The fourth option is RSS Headlines. These headlines are spidered according to a NewsIsFree changes.xml file.
The only problem with searching RSS headlines is you can't restrict your search to weblog RSS. But that shouldn't even matter considering you can search the full text of weblogs on Daypop (12,500 of them).
How many people out there are still confused about Daypop's function in the weblog world?
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Word Normalization
Perhaps radio buttons would be better? I think that whatever there is, there will always be some people who just don't get it.
I noticed on the word bursts today, that 'dram' was listed, and below that the excerpt said 'dramática.' It seems to me that in the process of normalizing words, characters with diactrics should be replaced by their non-diactric equivelants, instead of acting as a word separator.
Popup Menu Hides the RSS Headline Search
I agree that the popup menu on the Daypop home page hides functionality. IMHO, the graphical tab approach that Google takes reveals functionality.
I think it is possible to design something with similar functionality to the Google graphical tabs without shamelessly copying Google's look and feel.
The other issue I want to point out about Daypop is that not everyone enters the site "through the front door". I typically come in through the "Daypop Top News Stories" page.
