Apparent proof that Yahoo! is testing an RSS search function appeared online Friday in the form of an RSS search Web site. The site--which would help users navigate the multitude of existing feeds--
became inaccessible later in the day, following press inquiries regarding the subject.
A Yahoo! spokeswoman said the company is always testing new and promising services, but refused to
comment on RSS search specifically.
With a higher proportion--nearly 60 percent--of served feeds than most other RSS readers combined, Yahoo!'s My Yahoo! RSS reader currently dominates the
space, according to numbers recently published by Feedburner, an RSS syndication technology company.
But, one possible explanation for Yahoo!'s drive to innovate and add service features is
the space's extremely nascent and immature state. For example, when Feedburner extracted several extremely popular feeds from its calculations, it found that My Yahoo! was the sixth most popular
reader in a highly fragmented list of over 20 readers and lead by Ask Jeeves' Bloglines.