Yes RSS can be both addictive and time consuming. But we say it’s worth its weight in gold(en information).  It’s impossible to put a price on the free, targeted, expert advice we get from our daily RSS dose. And we’re not just talking free advice, we’re also talking product & service reviews, images & icon sets, plus the latest industry news.

You name it, and it gets delivered straight to us, almost instantaneously, 100% free, less the unobtustrusive email bombardment. The time and money we save through RSSing far outweigh the time costs we spend in skimming our beloved gReader every day.

We do admit that you need to keep an eye on your RSS “balance”. If you see feeds that are “costing” you time but returning you nothing, delete them. You need to constantly “balance” your RSS books.

Good RSS feeds give incredible returns. So if you’re a freelancer at any level, DO NOT declare RSS bankruptcy. Just stop wasting your time with “expensive” feeds, and make sure you subscribe to free, invaluable feeds like ours and Freelance Switch’s.

But if you’re wanting to “search” their website for some specific info, be warned – their search really sucks.

It sucks for a few reasons:

• there are NO filtering options
• there are NO sorting options
• you cannot enter a long search query (like an article title) because the search times out with a “Fatal Error: maximum time exceeded” error

We only discovered this today while searching Sphinn for our article “Yoast, the SEO WordPress Wizard“, which has been submitted with that exact title. So when you know the exact title of an article, and you want to find it quickly, the title is an obvious search choice. Isn’t it..?

So I started shortening the search query to avoid the timing out issue. Here’s how short our queries went to return any results:

• Yoast, the SEO WordPress Wizard = “fatal error: timeout”
• Yoast, the SEO WordPress = “fatal error: timeout”
• Yoast, the SEO Word = “fatal error: timeout”
• Yoast, the SEO = diluted, irrelivant, unsortable, unfilterable search results. 30+ pages of them.

The problem is, by the time you’ve shortened your search enough to avoid timing out, your query is so weak that your search results are largely irrelivant. And because you cannot filter or sort, you’re left no option but to wade through hundreds of search results.

So we thought focusing on our primary keywords might make Sphinn search life easier. Guess again. Here’s our next attempt to find a single article that we know the title of and we know exists!

• Yoast SEO WordPress = “fatal error: timeout”
• Yoast SEO WordPress Wizard = “359 Pages of results”.

That’s 8975 articles..! And no where in the first 3 pages is our beloved “Yoast, the SEO WordPress Wizard” article.

This is all to hard.
We told you Sphinn search sucks.
Maybe there’s just some issue with the Sphinn search feature today..?
Maybe Google have spoilt us all..?

We’ve sent an email to Spinn Customer Support, so we’ll let you all know if there’s any reply.