Mindful Musings

PS: Some of these might be implemented already, please leave me some comments if you have figured them out already!

I would really like to be able to find (and add to my favorite reader) RSS feeds through Google. Considering the amount of stuff that Google stores about each link, auto-discovering RSS feeds and adding them to each link that is displayed on a search results page should be trivial. I have read about some work that was being done at Google with RSS feed searches and adding syndicated sites to news.google.com. However, that was some time ago and I have yet to hear anything contructive of it. RSS, in my opinion, really brings out the content and leaves riff raff aside. I really miss FeedDemon! (which supports autodiscovery and Blog This! using XMLRPC, from inside the program interface) Yahoo is headed in just the right direction with their RSS aggregator.

I would really like to be able to use Froogle to my advantage. That site needs some serious work to be a true competitor. No e-compare site is complete without personalization and reviews (albeit from external sources) and Froogle lacks both reviews as well as any personalization. I would like to head to Froogle the next time I need DVD+Rs but dealtime.com does a much better job.

Google should support some sort of web service through XMLRPC or REST (or some other protocol). I am aware of Google APIs that can be embedded within a webpage to search the the site but I am not aware of any web services offered through Google. That would be really useful. I guess all of this could be implemented through the google.com url, but web services would be cleaner (much like waypath, only different!). Froogle would be a nice candidate for XMLRPC as well.

I would also like to be able to run searches which return unique results. I wish I could type “show only one result from a domain” I understand that this would break down real quick because websites exist in folders everywhere, but the concept can be really useful and I miss it dearly. This would also make internet statistics easy to gather and would actually be dependable.

Stemming from this idea, I would actually like to be able to search meta tags through Google (or through any other search engine for that matter). I understand that Google pays very little attention to meta tags, but I would, at times, like to know what lurks in those bloated tags and find sites with only a certain set of tags (again very useful in data collection and collation) I really want to know how many people use Frontpage to design their site, for example.

I know I thought of a couple more. I will post them as and when I think of them. Do you know of any of these that are available already? Can you think of anything else you wish of Google?