Discover New Feeds With FeedMil

How are most Internet users discovering new interesting blogs or sites? The most popular methods are probably by following links on blogs they already read, through social media, and by recommendations posted in their feed reader.

Yes, there are blog directories like Technorati but most of them concentrate on the top blogs and not on smaller blogs. Feedmil could become a viable alternative to finding new and interesting blogs.

It is basically a blog search engine that has a search form, and a slider that you select the range you want the service to search in. The two sides of the slider are surprising and well known.

The interesting aspect is that you can select a range for blogs that are related to the search term. Surprising blogs are those that are not known by many users, that do not have thousands of readers while well known blogs are the exact opposite of this obviously.

The search results window is also not the usual top x results. Feedmil provides access to filters, classifications and more sliders. The filters and sliders can be used to fine tune the results list. Classifications give an excellent overview of post frequencies, popularity, authority and activity of each of the listed blogs.

The filters can be used to filter by feed type or language and to change the sort order. Several different feed types can be selected including blog feeds, podcasts, videocasts and microblog feeds. Languages should be self explanatory while the sort order can be changed from Fedmil rank to quality or relevance instead.

The sliders on the right side make it possible to finetune the topic significance to lay more or less weight on specific related terms. Each blog that is listed in the search results is also described by a list of tags.

The idea is definitely interesting. The main problem currently is that the service does not offer a large index of blogs in its database. Site owners can submit their blogs to the search engine to have it included in the search.

Update: Feedmil is no longer available. Alternatives are for instance the feed recommendation and discovery services offered by Google Reader or the desktop feed reader RSSOwl.

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