Find more with FriendFeed Search

We've made some improvements to our search functionality. Searching is now faster and more reliable, and we added a number of useful advanced search features. You can:

  • Search for words only in entry titles or in comments
    [intitle:superbowl] - entries that mention "Superbowl" in the title
  • Search for only entries that were liked or commented on by specific friends
    [like:bret football] - entries about football that Bret has liked
  • Search for entries with a minimum number of likes or comments
    [comments:5 friendfeed] - entries that mention FriendFeed with at least 5 comments
  • Exclude terms from your search
    [jobs -steve] - entries about the job market, not the CEO of Apple

Visit our advanced search page to see the full list of available search features.

Screenshot

Have a question about FriendFeed? Ask about it in the FriendFeed Feedback room (Tip: Search the Feedback room to see if your question's been asked before).

14 comments:

Brian Solis said...

EXCELLENT NEWS! Can you guys add a date range too? :)

Shey said...

Excellent! Thank you!

Anonymous said...

Very nice. Are the same capabilities available through the search API?

louisgray said...

Great job guys - was looking forward to this in a big way. Nice timing.

Chris + Shalan G said...

Cheers to this news, absolutely huge.

Looking forward to setting up alerts based on results, this will help immensely...

Dread Lord CyberSkull said...

Nice, but I'd still love to see the friend search for the services.

xavierv said...

This is excellent. What a life simplifier!

Scobleizer said...

This is freaking awesome. Some things we still need:

1. We can't import Atom feeds these searches generate into rooms. That is a real problem which is limiting the room's usefulness to me and others.
2. We can't select date ranges. I want to see all items with Obama in the title on November 5, 2008, for instance, and I can't do that.
3. I would love to be able to search based on location that an item originated from (especially useful with Brightkite items).
4. I would like to search for items with multiple words, but that are combined. Like "techmeme rocks" -- I can't do that, or, at least, I haven't figured out how to do it.
5. Why can't we see a real-time view of searches?
6. I would like to have an embed code for my blog so I can easily copy and paste results onto my blog, or link to them or embed them into a widget on my blog. Linking is fairly easy, but embedding or copying is not. At least not for wordpress.com.

But, this is a HUGE move forward. Thank you so much!

Unknown said...

This latest improvement is going to add even more value to FriendFeed - A real time saver.

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Looks great. I'd be really interested to know what the underlying search technology is: did you base this off something like Lucene or have you rolled your own full text search implementation from scratch?

giorgiotave said...

Thanks for new features.

I agreed this:

"
We can't select date ranges. I want to see all items with Obama in the title on November 5, 2008, for instance, and I can't do that."

Jonathan Coffman said...

Am I able to exclude my own posts from the searches?

Bret Taylor said...

Jonathan: the search term -from:username will exclude a person's posts from searches. So I can search for entries that mention FriendFeed from people other than me with: [friendfeed -from:bret].

CEE said...

this new search capability has caused me major problems when trying to find items that i've posted many months ago. i used to be able to search for something without any trouble by entering one keyword. now i receive results for everything, but the item i'm looking for.

it's a bit of a nuisance not being able to track items one has posted in their feed a while back. i wasn't experiencing this issue prior to the roll out of the advanced search option feature. if i wanted to search for something in my own feed, i would search for it on the my feed's page. now i get results from other rooms that i've posted in and it's often that i don't even end up finding what i'm looking for - things i know i've posted in the past.

for instance i posted a youtube video about dolphings blowing rings in my own feed and it doesn't come up in either the regular or advanced search. i also posted something about a photographer named pieter hugo called "the hyena & other men" and nothing comes up, but i get other people's results.

in addition to the general sharing of items that goes on in friendfeed, i've also used it to build up a library/catalogue of items and bookmarks that i used to be able to easily search for & find by entering specific words of items relating to the article. i'm no longer able to do this as the search function seems to be mixing results of topics from not only other rooms i've posted in, but other people despite setting the correct searching parameters (or at least what i believe to be are the correct ones).