Spotting SearchFox about a week ago, I immediately requested for a beta testing account and was accepted the next day. Over the weekend, I’ve spent a few hours to review what it’s all about.

Claiming to be the RSS aggregator which tracks usage behavior and customize the content according that data, it sure spiked some interest for an RSS enthusiast like me.

The short video demo about the machine learning RSS reader shows how it exactly works. It’s available on SearchFox website.

First Impression about SearchFox

The confirmation email replying to my request for an account included my login information and URL to login. Changing the password and re-login took a few short seconds.

On the first screen called My World there are links to show the feed entries from last day, last week, last month, favorites or all. A drop down batch action menu is available to mark page read, mark page unread, save and remove page, collage and remove summaries, archive page, and delete page.

At the top right side of the page is the feature to search the entries and within results. Just below the search is one-click toggle to turn the personalization feature on or off. Turning it on will rank the page entries according to usage history.

SearchFox comes preloaded with many RSS feeds in health, movies, news, photography, sports, technology gadgests, and television category. For beginners, this comes as a good start to get their feet wet as to what RSS feeds can provide. More advanced users might find it rather annoying and choose to delete them all and start from scratch.

Users have to scroll down, especially if they have a lower resolution screen to find the Manage My World link in the Resources menu where the feature to add/ remove/ edit folders and feeds are available.

Migrating Existing Feed via OPML to SearchFox

The export OPML link is in place but not available for testing yet.

I tested importing an OPML file from a FeedDemon’s group to SearchFox and it worked with only one warning message stating that one of the feed is currently unreachable. Unfortunately SearchFox didn’t import the title of the group properly instead of just leaving it Untitled. The rename folder feature worked like a charm though.

Importing all groups of RSS feeds within a single OPML file imports the group/ folder name correctly.

Browsing RSS Entries

Another limiting feature is inability to view at least snippets of the RSS feed items and just the title of the entries.

RSS feed of the particular group will be available soon. I think I can get this into good use by loading the feed into other RSS reader. It will be very nice if they can still get the learning process working outside of their own aggregator too.

SearchFox probably can add confirmation message so that users won’t inadvertently lose their feed folder by just clicking on the Delete link. At least having this option under the Options or something where a user can turn the feature on or off, like commonly found on any web application like web mail.

The ranking system automatically took place once I clicked on the first item randomly from the list, SearchFox brought it up, together with the other entries in the same feed to the top of the list. It facilitates the use of score to rank particular entries and feeds. Clicking the title of the entry opened up a new window that will load the destination URL.

Again I would appreciate an excerpt if full text feed is not available.

Conclusion

Overall, I am quite impressed with SearchFox. It imported and loaded hundreds of my feeds in a minute or less. It’s still in beta and testing is available for those who request for it. But consider if they complete all the features they promise and more, it can definitely compete with other online RSS aggregators with this set of powerful features.