The volume of wine information available online today can be overwhelming. There are wine forums, wine communities, winery sites, wine association sites, wine region sites, wine blogs, and much more. With new content often being added to these sites by the second, it’s nearly impossible to keep up. And if you just want to stay informed on a specific wine related topic, such as the latest discussions about your favorite winery, how do you sift through the river of new content to find what you really want to read?

What if you could design your own RSS feed that pulled together the latest happenings for just the topics you were interested in? Well, a small but powerful feature was just added to Scrugy that allows you to do just that. Here’s how it works.

Say your favorite wine region is Paso Robles and you’d like to build an RSS feed that provides the latest wine blog posts mentioning the area. The first thing you’d need to do is submit a blog search on Scrugy for “paso robles”.  To do this just type “paso robles” (in this case include the quotes so Scrugy treats it as a phrase–this will improve the accuracy of the results), select “just wine related blogs” from the search type drop-down, and click “Search”. The search results will show you all blog posts with the phrase “paso robles”. Now since you want the feed to always show you the latest blog posts, sort the results by newest to oldest by clicking on the “Newest” link (just above the first search result). Great, now you’ve got the results the way you want them. The last step is to grab the RSS feed for the search so you can add it to your favorite RSS reader. This is where the new feature comes in. You will notice a small orange “XML” image along the upper right side of the search results page. This link will provide the very same search results of your search but in RSS format. Right-click to copy the link to your computer’s clipboard so you can paste into your favorite reader.

Now whenever you access this feed you will receive the latest results from Scrugy. Comments? Suggestions? Let us know. Also, thanks to eljefe from Twisted Oak Winery Blog for suggesting the feature.

During the most recent Wine 2.0 online chat, Jason Coleman, co-founder of WineLog, asked about using microformats for the tasting notes on WineLog and getting them indexed on Scrugy. By reviewing some of the basic hReview information on Wineformats.org and some of the wine specific class names recognized by Scrugy, Jason was able to quickly annotate some pages on WineLog to become microformat enabled. The beauty of microformats and what makes them so easy to integrate is that you can apply them to your existing markup without changing the layout or look of your pages.

The next step was to get them indexed on Scrugy. This happens one of two ways. Either the Scrugy crawler will pick them up when it periodically crawls pages on WineLog or Scrugy can pick them up from an RSS feed.  The RSS feed is the better way to go, though, since it will get the most recent tasting notes indexed as the RSS feed is updated on WineLog. The crawler is somewhat random and may only periodically visit WineLog. Since Jason has an RSS feed for the latest WineLog updates, I added this feed to the ever growing list of wine-related RSS feeds that Scrugy monitors. There was one catch, though. In order for Scrugy to pick up microformats in RSS feeds, the feed items themselves must be formatted with microformats too. Since that was going to be a lot more work for Jason, I made some changes to Scrugy to follow the links (i.e. the <link> element) associated with each RSS item and check those pages for microformats. Since the pages pointed to the by links were the ones Jason had changed, Scrugy picked them just fine. So now the Scrugy crawler will detect tasting notes on WineLog as well as the Scrugy RSS feed fetcher.

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Scrugy continues to grow as the Internet’s best resource for wine information. As of today Scrugy has over 6.3 million pages in its index from wine related sites. That’s right! When you perform a search on Scrugy, you’re results will always be about wine and will come from the Internet’s largest resource of wine information. And when you combine Scrugy’s immense web search capabilities with a blog search engine covering over 130,000 wine related posts, why would you trust your wine searches to any other site?

Besides aggregating the best that the web has to offer on wine related content and tasting notes, Scrugy is also a state-of-the-art search engine.  But did you know that Scrugy allows you to limit your search to just wine blogs? To do a blog search, enter a search phrase in the search box at the top of any Scrugy page, click “double down arrow” to display the “search within” drop-down, select “just wine related blogs”, and then “Search”.

Since I’m drinking a Concannon Petite Sirah this evening, a search for blogs mentioning this wine would look like the following screen shot.

Once I click the “Search” button, Scrugy displays the results ordered by relevance. But what if I want the results ordered by the most recent blog post? No problem. Scrugy allows you to order results by relevance or by the newest or oldest post date.

Why risk your wine searches to any other site? Scrugy delivers the results you’re looking for the way you want them.

Suggestions? Comments? Let us know.