I finally received the iPod Nano given as a gift by Feedster! At the end of last year, they named Double-Tongued Word Wrester as having the third best feed of the year for 2005. The Nano is the prize for that. They even engraved it. Yay!
Now, I don’t want to seem churlish and ungrateful, but I hope they also soon fix their search engine so that if you click on the link for the last page in a list of results the database doesn’t always time out with “NULL Database link” or “We’re sorry but Feedster is temporarily down for maintenance. We’ll be back soon.” It’s almost impossible to see the oldest results turned up by a search for a term with more than a few months of history.
Incidentally, IceRocket has a similar problem. If a search turns up more than 50 pages of results sorted by date, it’s impossible to see pages 51 or higher. You have to do a custom date search instead to exclude recent results. IceRocket also does not always correctly display phrase search results: if you search for “real life,” for example, more than a few of the result summaries do not show the phrase, but instead contain the separate words “real” and “life”—although the phrase is indeed inside the post if you click through to the result. But having to click through takes too much time—accurate summaries are really very useful for judging search results before clicking through to one.
I use both search engines, by the way, when trying to find earliest uses of slang words, especially those that seem to have arisen in the online world or contemporaneously with it.
