RSS (Rich Site Summary) as we know is the most common way to publish content that's regularly updated on the web. Using your feed reader, you can have all the fresh pickings without needing to visit each site individually. Today, any website or blog worth its salt syndicates its content via RSS feeds. It is the easiest forms of "˜social communication'. Just like any part of a website, RSS feeds are also optimized for search engines. The RSS meta-data i.e. the data that defines the feed includes the publishing date and any other useful information that might be included in its XML code.

That's why you can think of feed search engines as one of the easiest ways to search for the latest feeds en masse. A feed search engine also links to the RSS feed link and a preview of the content if you choose to subscribe without browsing through the site.

Here are five you can try out and see if they give you more convenient results than a general search engine.

Search 4 RSS

feed search engine

Search4RSS.com helps you discover feeds by using a keyword. An auto-complete dropdown helps you with possible keywords. You can click on the URL of the website in the search results or directly click on the RSS feed link and subscribe to it. A grey link lets you preview the feed content from the site. Search4RSS.com is actually a motley of search engines available through one search box.

Plazoo

rss feed search engine

The name comes from the Dutch language and it means something that's close to 'a place to search'. Plazoo is an RSS search engine that looks for news and information in thousands of RSS-Feeds. You can search across categories like blogs, company news, job market, news and media, and more. Results can be sorted by relevance or date. A set of advanced filters also fine tunes the search results. For instance, you can set which date should the oldest result have. You can limit searches by languages and media type too. You can use a ClipBox to save any of the search results.

RSSoogle [No Longer Available]

rss feed search engine

Quite obviously, the name of the feed search engine comes from RSS and Google. You can use it like a general purpose search engine or use it to search for RSS feeds with a click on either of its two buttons. RSSoogle.com also extracts the date of the feed, so you can go for the ones which are current. If you like to add the search tool to your list of search engines in the browser; click on the link given at the top.

RSSMicro

rss feed search engine

RSSMicro.com is a feed specific search tool that taps into 12,000 indexed news sources. The service also uses its own proprietary feed ranking technology to improve the quality of the search results. Along with the feed search, you can do a web search, videos, and images. Before subscribing to the feed you can look into the inline preview and other included posts. After trying out the service, I am still a bit fuzzy about the co-relation between the site's own Feedrank and the real timeliness of the search results.

Jamesoo

feed search engine

Jamesoo presents the searched out latest news in a newspaper-styled layout with a summary and a link to the main content. The search engine takes all the news from the latest RSS feeds published. You can also use the crawler in a choice of 15 languages. It is not perfect though, as some old posts make their way into the results page.

Feed search engines may not be your preferred method, but RSS feed search engines are another category of search tools you can keep in your research toolbox. Feeds are coded in specific ways that make it easy to digest by search tools like these. Usual search engines commonly index a site as a whole. That's why even as search engines improve, you can use these feed specific search engines and broaden the scope of your results.

Also be sure to check out these posts on some great search engines:

The 5 Most Advanced Search Engines On The Web

13 Alternative Search Engines That Find What Google Can't

Top 7 Semantic Search Engines As An Alternative To Google

Can you recommend any more?