An effective guide to search & find great stories on Medium
Hello readers! Reading stories on Medium is an easy chore due to the minimalistic design of the website. But do you know there are many other ways to find great stories by manually exploring Medium (not using the website search bar) rather than relying on recommendations?
It isn’t the quality of the medium that is dropping but your day-to-day recommendations.
This article helps you to easily find riveting and great stories on Medium for free. Medium has a systematic method of organizing its libraries, and this article decodes it by providing simple ways to discover great content, fresh and archived!
So let’s jump into action.
Why not just read recommended stories?
Answer this. When did you last refine your recommendation topics on Medium?
On average, a medium reader changes their set topics in every 2 years. But the same reader’s personality will evolve every quarter or after a major life event. So clearly there is a gap in getting the right recommendations. It means the recommendations on Medium are prepared for the past self. Let’s call these topics outdated interests.
It would help if you didn’t accept stories from medium default recommendations, as it creates a loop of interest where:
- Stories are shown based on outdated interests
- Stories served from step 1 are read over and over, making medium algorithms believe you are still interested in the same topics but in a stronger way
This causes a boring loop of topics and you as a reader stuck in the same reading zone.
To improve yourselves as a reader, you should go on a hunt for new, diverse topics. For ex: If you have initially chosen Technology, cooking topics are mostly hidden from you, unless you search for cooking explicitly and like and comment on them.
Therefore it is important to manually look up different topics on the medium regularly to normalize your recommendations so that they spread across various topics and not just on a few `soon-to-become` outdated interests.
I am going to show you three main approaches to how you can search for new topics/articles medium.
Approach 1: Find stories from medium topic explorer
You can see all main topics listed on the page called “Explore Topics” by navigating to this link. The link displays many top-level and sub-topics on the page with a search bar.
The page looks like this as of July 2024:
These topics are ranked by Medium out of hundreds of thousands of internal topics, so it is already a valuable grouping.
Medium curates this list, so make use of it to access new topics once in a while. If you don’t find specific topics, use the search bar. What the search bar does is it opens a URL like below and appends the topic at the end:
https://medium.com/tag/<topic>
For example, medium gets all articles related to the topic: coffee, by building the URL:
You can replace <topic> with any custom topic and get articles related to it. This search will get articles based on recency and popularity with higher weight to recency. Let’s call this a regular topic query for now and later parts of this article.
Find complex topics (with multiple words)
Use — (dash) separated topic, if you have a topic that can have multiple words.
For example, to fetch stories on the topic: “self improvement”, use this query:
Approach 2 : Find recommended stories of a given topic
Sometimes we may need to get top-rated (recommended) stories from a given topic. This can be done by appending /recommended to the end of the regular topic query.
Approach 3: Find stories from Medium archives based on a topic
Medium stores millions of articles every year. This gigantic corpus can be easily accessed by tapping into medium archives. Archives are different from regular topic query results because archive provides various filters to customize the query. One can access the archive on a given topic by appending archive at the end of a regular topic query.
You can even get stories from the year 2022on topic: coffeeby selecting the filter as shown in this screen:
The great thing about this page is is you can even find stories from a topic at a month-level of granularity. Isn’t that awesome?
My curated medium topic list and sub-topics
What about Medium Publications & Lists?
Publications and story lists are other types of grouping supported by Medium. Unfortunately, they cannot be easily mined as they are scoped under a user or publication. If any of you know how to do that, please feel free to drop a comment. I am all ears!
Conclusion
As a reader, I always find ways to improve myself by obtaining knowledge that can lead me to newer dimensions of knowledge, and this article is one such attempt to share a simply advanced way to find stories on Medium that works 10x better than just reading recommended stories.
I hope this article helps you in your path of better reading. Because you came this long, I am giving away a few goodies to you in the next section.
Few goodies for Curious & Like-minded:
If you are a software engineer who wants to expand your skillset beyond coding, study the below collections:
Book Recommendations:
Technical Documentation:
Productivity:
Self Learning:
Cryptography:
Resume Writing:
Genius:
Career Growth:
Layoffs:
