New experimental pages from the MSN Search team

Someone just told me about two new pages from the MSN Search playground (https://sandbox.msn.com).

The first page - https://www.start.com/1 - combines a very fast MSN search page with an online RSS reader. The original page is very small, almost 4K, and it loads pretty much instantly. After the initial page is loaded, it will start to load in background the RSS feed, while if I can start typing the search keywords in parallel.

In the RSS reader you can simply select, with a single click, the feeds you want to subscribe on. On the same page, I also have "feeds" on the most recent searches - this is really a cool feature. Now I know what RSS reader I will use in the future :-)

The second page - at https://www.start.com/2 - implements an online version of the Favorites folder. I was looking for a third page at https://www.start.com/3 but there is nothing at that address (yet?).

 

P.S. I did a quick test and these pages work well with Firefox too. Also, the pages are using xhtml. Interesting.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2005
  It's a shame they don't let you define your own categories, or allow you to choose from a broader selection.
  
  Also no operating system I use seems to have a setting for 'default feed reader' so I have to copy and paste feed URL's manually from my FF Live Bookmarks folder which is very annoying.
  
  It isn't nearly as customizable as many other feed readers out there. Also, given it's web based, I'm rather concerned about the lack of privacy policy!
  
  But given it's beta the interface is very promising.