Sigh.
Just a few days ago I was going through a multi-hour process to disentangle from OneDrive and now, for reasons, I’m doing the same thing for Feedly. Some of it is similar. A recurring cost that offers little real value compared to what I can do myself. A company that considers its AI-arm to be its true innovation. Features and elements I like being de-prioritized over a different type of client than I am.
And while Feedly is different in several ways…
- OneDrive is more integrated into the default Windows experience
- Feedly genuinely is one of the best feed readers out there, while OneDrive is not necessarily one of the best cloud-based storage systems
- Feedly is a lot more “optional” than proper file management, even if very helpful
- I would say that Feedly is actually innovative in its interface, even if I don’t need most of it
…it still hit an irk in me this morning.
I went to search for something. The above picture shows me searching for “dice1.” That’s not what I searched, initially, [it was “daylight savings time” which glitched it out] but it will do for a demo.
I had to click several things to tell it “just my feeds, please” instead of “Feeds & All Web” and then to unclick the defaults of “Business & Strategy” and “Tech Blogs” as well.
After which, I got the worst search results since Bing was initially launched.
I could only see, nearly fully, the “top result” but not click on it. Every other result is faded out and hidden. In fact, they are not search results at all. They are dummy results slapped behind a “disabled-entries” flag.
I can’t even tell if this is just some sort of hiccup in the system or if they really expect me to upgrade to Pro+ just to be able to search by classifying “search” as “follow” which are two different sorts of tasks.
It for sure has encapsulated what should be a fairly simple task as a “Feedly AI” worthy one. If you go all the way back up to the top, you’ll see the “Feedly AI” tweaked my search options to generate more results…none of which were usable by me. Outside of that, if I search for something in my feeds and there are no results, I want there to be no results. I’m not just idly passing time. I’m trying to use information.
Keep in mind, there used to be a fairly user friendly, intuitive search feature just a little over a year ago. One I am pretty sure wasn’t locked behind the Pro/Pro+ features. I was Pro, then. In fact, I joined Feedly in August (?) 2016 and joined Pro around a month later. And kept it, at the actual ridiculous fee of around $8usd for a decade.
I should have bolted when they started going more in on Enterprise level tasks rather than just serving a product that worked.
At any rate, spent around an hour researching private and self-hosted type feed readers and began migrating stuff over (including finding a fun glitch where CloudFlare keeps killing some OpenRSS feeds).
Will probably delete my entire Feedly account soon. They can have MBAs using AI models to track awful crypto blogs be their customer base if they want that crowd so badly.
Going Back to Check…it is designed worse than I thought
So I went back before clicking post because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing some obvious checkmark. I might still be missing some check mark, but, I am pretty confident that I am not missing an obvious one.
Some things I learned.
Feedly still brands its search as “Across Your Favorite Sources” on the home screen…
heh, “easily.” “Just fifteen clicks to not get any results! easy!”
…then changes up the language once you get to the search page.
Note that most of those are AI searches rather than just a simple search across data.
Technically you can see THREE of your results, you just have to check them all and save them to a board
Note, you have to believe that the checkbox exist and just mouse over it. The fun thing about “3 articles selected” (and with some testing, it seems to always be three articles returned for a search) is that it means there is always a completely hidden-in-fog article down below for absolutely NO reason since it’s just white, no-display space. They are literally wasting server and browser processing time to show you something that isn’t there. It’s probably something to do with needing extra space to get the proper fade on the gradient. Or just plain madness.
“Yesterday on the stairs, I met a Feedly search result that wasn’t there…”
That’s…just awful. That’s some serious tomfoolery.
Yeah, deleting that account very shortly.
NOTE: I have not tested the app and right now don’t care to test the app. I’d rather just delete than waste any more time on this. Maybe it works as expected, there, but none of these things suggest good things about the future of this product.
- I don’t know which is worse, the fact that it assumed I was searching for “DICE” the company and tagged it as a company search OR the fact that it absolutely did not matter since it just did a keyword search anyhow across my feeds. Terrible. ↩︎