Jeremy Zawodny's sparked a blogosphere burst by musing about how the big boys have left webfeed search to little fish like Feedster, and Technorati, not to mention the "newsey" types like PubSub, Findory, and Topix. John Battelle has a nice roundup of the overall discussion, including a pointer to Rich (Topix) Skrenta's spin that the blogosphere is USENET 1.7 for better or worse. Comments on many of these posts are really useful as well.
Folks are fishing around for why this space might be big. It's dependent on a value proposition that gets lots of people into using aggregators. At that point users are providing way more personal information than just 2.x search terms. Also, aggregation provides a mechanism to deliver unsolicited information in a more personalized context, but hopefully without as much spam. And one bonus is that users are in browse mode, so a commercial interruption is not as devastating as when it interrupts the task focused drive (according to Jakob Nielsen) of search mode.
But there needs to be a demonstrated mass of people using aggregators. Enter Bloglines, best of breed web based aggregator, with a search engine baked in. Adoption of Findory, Topix, and PubSub also points to healthy growth. These guys are where the feed search story is going to really be played out.
I'll just throw in three other words that could make this really juicy for the geeks at Google, Yahoo!, MSN, IBM, etc. Personalized focused crawlers.