The current state of “feed search” is messy at best. Joseph Scott does a good job of presenting his impressions on the major feed search engines (where “feed” means RSS/Atom):
Say I wanted to track what people are saying about PostgreSQL. This can’t really be done with the traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) because they base their results on popularity (in one form or another). This doesn’t help me because I’m interested in what people are saying right now, not who has said the most popular thing. So I started using the feed search sites to see how they stacked up. The results were extremely disappointing.
His frustration is quite clear and I also feel the pain. It’s hard right now. And he’s certainly right to say that “this really can’t be done with traditional search engines” but his reasoning is a bit off. So rather than talk about how to fix the problem, I think it’s worth looking at a few of the differences between these new “search engines” and the previous generation. In doing so, pieces of the solution may become obvious.