Wednesday, August 10th, 2005, 12:15 pm
Google News Feeds
ollowing rumours and an official announcement in the Google Blog, feeds are available for news items over at Google. Perhaps this takes us one step closer to full support for SERP RSS feeds (top 10 search results delivered to your feeds aggregator). Google News results can currently be delivered as RSS or Atom feeds. They are composed of items from a specific section (topic) or news returned for a given search term/s.
This move can certainly make Google Alerts for news obsolete, yet such alerts for non-news searches remain practical, albeit difficult to handle (periodical HTML-formatted E-mails).
Ben Hammersley (c/f: Keeping Track of Google, Google Results as RSS Feeds) has devised a workaround which enables you to get results as RSS feeds for standard Web searches at Google. Be warned that scraping is possibly involved, so the technique is questionable.
Yahoo have been offering news RSS feeds for quite some time. This has been very useful when tracking particular terms, so I am convinced Google will benefit from their recent decision (or implementation).