RSS - Aggregate the Aggregators?

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After quite a bit of peripheral research on RSS (not just what is is, because we've been using it for a long time - more about where the "whole thing is headed"), I decided to try my hand at "aggregating the aggregators". There are enough search engines of various types now that offer to return their results as RSS that it made sense to build a "Multisearch RSS aggregation engine" -- and so I did.

Basically what this little puppy does is take your list of search URLs - which usually have two parts - the main URI part, then your query term(s), and then an optional "part 2" that determines RSS, number of results, etc.

These all take your query and send it out to each engine asynchronously on a threadpool (I like Ami Bar's "SmartTthreadpool" - a really magnificent job). The results are stored in a hashtable with the link as the key so as to be able to easily weed out duplicate links. Then, they are ordered by pubDate most recent first, and returned to the caller as a DataSet - allowing the calling app or page to decide how it wants to present the results. What I do with this search page that uses my "engine" is perform an XSL Transform and is save the result html on the filesystem and keep a list of "Recent search" links right on the page that people can choose from. These, of course, will come up immediately since there is no need to go out to the search engines to get the results. It even inserts up to three "ads" in the result page, and the page automatically deletes searches that were cached and are older than X number of days. The engine portion uses an "EngineState" class that holds all the parameters and uses the XmlSerializer to serialize itself to and from an XML configuration file.

After a trial period and some more tuning and cleanup, I'll probably write an article and make the source code available. Meanwhile, if you would like to preview the RSS Multisearch Engine, here's the location.

RSS is exploding in the last year or so. It's actually kinda scary when you think about it...

Comments are always welcome.
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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