Techmeme Search is a great tool for for ego-surfing and for tracking news related to your favorite topics (think Google Alerts).

For instance, you may want to know when a story that quotes “Mark Cuban” hits Techmeme. Or when a story from your own blog makes it to the Techmeme homepage. Or when a story that links to your blog gets featured on to Techmeme.

You can dig this kind of data very easily using advanced search operators in Techmeme. See examples:

1. body:mark cuban - find stories that mention “mark cuban” in the content (RSS). 2. link:labnol.org - Techmeme stories that link to labnol.org (RSS) 3. sourceurl:labnol.org - find stories from labnol.org that made it to Techmeme (RSS)

Now how do you track these search result. Techmeme currently doesn’t offer RSS feeds for their search results but that is no issue as we can easily create RSS feeds for Techmeme Search via dapper.net.

Following are some ready-to-subscribe feeds for Techmeme. Just remember to replace SEARCH_QUERY with your own phrase or search operator as outlined above.

http://www.dapper.net/transform.php?dappName=Techmeme&transformer=RSS&extraArg_title=Title&extraArg_description[]=Sources&extraArg_pubDate=Date&v_Search_Term=**SEARCH_QUERY**

Techmeme search also supports the regular boolean operators in search phrases.  You may subscribe to the feed in your news reader, the iGoogle homepage or in sendmerss for instant email alerts.

And do install Techmeme Search in your Firefox or Internet Explorer search box for quick access.