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Show HN: Search >34k niche blogs and RSS feeds

getblaze.email
by alastairr·2y ago·4 comments·view on hn ↗
hi HN! as part of the https://blaze.email project (automated tech newsletters and content search), I've added a feature to search all of the blogs and feeds that I've indexed.

You can search by adding 'type:feeds' and some keywords in the search box. A bit janky I know, but I've found it quite interesting and hopefully some others might too. I was thinking about adding an opml export function to this, but I'm open to ideas, and any general feedback you might have. thanks :)

4 comments
Looks good! How much is something like this going to cost you?

Asking because my immediate thought was that these types of projects usually get their lights turned off rather quickly because of costs.

What is your source for the feeds?

right now the biggest cost is llm api calls (currently claude haiku) for organising content and making it easily searchable - this is relatively cheap (max 50$ per month). I use pinecone for search which so far has been very inexpensive, though admittedly traffic has been low, so I'll see how that goes.

on feeds - I've built a list over a number of years, a mix of tracking blogs on twitter, hacker news and a few other places. usually the feed url can be lifted quite easily from a blog's header.

Ugh, let me rephrase the question then, is this 34,000 blogs as in websites, or blogs as in posts? I assumed the former, but sounds like I might have been wrong since building a list of 34k niche websites would be next to impossible.

I am guessing you have added everything from here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081

and the subsequent site that offers the OPML for those blogs:

https://dm.hn/

Yes, it's 34k websites, but to be transparent, they probably don't all strictly qualify as niche, for example, it includes some smaller commercial sites (usually if they have tech blogs). I've found the hardest part of this isn't finding the feeds so much as filtering out the usual suspects (SEO etc) that masquerade as technical content.

As well as HN, I found a google search along the lines of "site:github.com opml rss feed [topic]" was quite effective too.