I've been evaluating several new (to me) search tools, BlogDigger, Feedster, and rssSearch. The feature I was looking for was a comprehensive blog searching tool that would sort results by recency of the post that contained my search term, and so far I'm very pleased with each of them.
BlogDigger doesn't seem to be working at all for the last day or so (returning zero results for me) but over the last week it's been really useful. It's pretty fast, returns lots of good information and the sorting by date does an admirable job of getting the newest stuff to the top. I'm not terribly fond of the style/display of the search results page and I'd encourage the authors to not constrict the search results to such a narrow column by hardcoding a px value table width. For folks with high-resolution screens, this is a real PITA.
Feedster is emerging as my new favorite except for one shortcoming; it doesn't remember my preferences. This is a minor annoyance, but good dated sorting is the sole reason I'm seeking out these tools so it's somewhat important to me. I'd also like to see a couple of the "preferences" reflected as toggles in the advanced search tab. The site stile is fresh and comfortable and the search results are easy to read, very current, and well ordered. When the preferences work for me this will no doubt be my favorite. Bonus points for the bookmarklet and having an active blog. I'd also really love a working Mozilla search plugin (the one at mycroft doesn't seem to work).
rssSearch is also really nice. It does a very good job of ordering by date and it's fairly current. My big complaints there are also usability issues. It's really a pain to have to scroll back up to the top of the page to see the next page of results and the style for highlighting the search term in context can make distinguishing visited from unvisited links a bit difficult. Kudos, however, for the debug output displayed at the bottom.
All three of these are very capable search tools if you're looking for the latest in blog posts on a particular topic. Go do a quick search for "mozilla" in each, sort by date and you'll get a really good snapshot of the latest in what people are saying about the mozilla project and products. Thanks again to Neil and Michael for pointing me in the right direction.
If any of you know of other search tools that will put recent posts at the top of the results lists, I'd love to hear about them.
