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It is that we can add a url to digg.com reader to add them to one's reading list. Once we submit the link they(digg) find several links which points to the feed map(.xml or from feedburner etc). How do they do this ?

Dan Lowe
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guy_fawkes
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    possible duplicate of [How To Discover RSS Feeds for a given URL](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/61535/how-to-discover-rss-feeds-for-a-given-url) – Joe Dec 03 '14 at 09:05
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    @Joe The question is answered and accepted by the creator. Those answers are not wrong but they do not solve many things. For example, we cant find a rss feed url to the site http://scoopwhoop.com/ with any of those solutions but digg.com does that. – guy_fawkes Dec 03 '14 at 09:21

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Feed discovery is step 1.

Step 2 is probably to have a "reverse" discovery mechanism. Each feed (RSS or Atom) as a link to an HTML representation. So, even if the other discovery part is missing you can still find a feed URL from a site if you have that 2nd relation... Combine that with user data (number of subscribers... etc) and you get a pretty good solution!

Step 3 is "dumb" search: each story in a feed has a link to domain. The feed itself has a domain. If they both match, you likely have found the feed you're looking for!

There are probably other techniques too :)

Julien Genestoux
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  • Feed auto-discovery is the primary way and it’s well-supported. Some modern clients will also try `/feed` on the root of the domain, because WordPress powers 27% of the web so there is a good chance there will be a feed there if the auto-discovery method fails. – Daniel Jan 05 '18 at 11:17