Advertisement
  1. SEJ
  2.  ⋅ 
  3. Tools

Yahoo Pipes Social Bookmarks Search

Yahoo Pipes Social Bookmarks Search

Yahoo Pipes, to date, seems one of those unsung tools that could really be useful, especially to SEOs. However, when I scour the sixty plus SEO blogs whose feeds I subscribe to, I don’t see Yahoo Pipes mentioned much. (I just checked.) But it can be of use:

  1. Aggregate multiple related web feeds.
  2. Filter for desired topics.
  3. Sort multiple feeds by date, to aid in detecting temporal trends (topics).
  4. Sort by keywords in feed item titles.
  5. Sort by member who submitted the story, in the case of social bookmarking sites.

I’ve been posting a number of simple Yahoo Pipes video how-to examples over at Tubetorial, but here’s a fresh one: social bookmark search. (Splashcast video at bottom.) I’ve taken the several feeds and merged them:

  1. del.icio.us.
  2. digg.
  3. reddit.
  4. slashdot.

Okay, Slashdot isn’t really a social bookmarking site per se, but it’s kind of the predecessor – no voting. And Digg and Reddit are more social news than social bookmarks. But it’s simply an example. You can change the feed list to your liking. [Yahoo Pipes could really do with an OPML import feature.]

After merging the feeds, an user-supplied search term is applied as a topical filter on the feed item titles or descriptions. The result is a new RSS feed that you can subscribe to and check on social news/ bookmarking trends more easily. A simple video how-to on building the Social Bookmarking Search pipe (which you can clone and tweak) is below.

Notes
A couple of things to take note of:

  • Digg had once blocked Yahoo Pipes, but I haven’t had any problem lately. In fact, I have another Pipe that organizes a day’s home page stories sorted by Digg submitter. (I’ll find it and post it here.)
  • There may be some problems with the audio of the SplashCast. If so, try again later. However, you may not need my narration to follow along.)
Category Tools
ADVERTISEMENT
Yahoo Pipes Social Bookmarks Search

Subscribe To Our Newsletter.

Conquer your day with daily search marketing news.