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Google News Now Providing RSS and Atom Feeds
Avery writes "Several sites are reporting that Google has announced in their blog today that they will provide RSS and Atom feeds in their news section. Previously the only way to get RSS/Atom feeds from Google news was through third party scrapers. Now, you can get feeds for any of Google's news areas as well as feeds for a news search. (The news search is basically the same concept as Google news alerts, only in RSS.)"
So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS.
/.), but in general I fail to see why the whole community is hailing RSS as the second coming of the Internet.
It was originally touted as a low-bandwidth solution, but this in most cases is false. If 10,000 people subscribe to a sites' RSS feed and set their RSS aggregators to 'refresh' that feed every 5 mins or so, the bandwidth usage very quickly mounts up. Most sites use dyanamically created pages even for the feeds, so pre checking the age of the page doesn't help.
I installed an RSS reader on my PDA, I thought it would be great for offline news browsing, but I quickly found that I was crippled by most of the feeds because they at very least just showed the news titles, and at most showed only the first paragraph of the articles. If I wanted to read more, I had to go online. If I'm going online I might as well just browse the web normally.
I'm sure RSS has niche uses (such as the slashboxes here on
Just my 2p's worth.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
A data scrape of an info amalgamation. Mmm.. sounds like it should be treated with some Bactine and a bandage.
This seemed like an easy and logical step for Google News. They've already got something similar for their blogspot service.
Check out their in-string wildcard searches, though. Cool!
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Incidentally, does anyone know why the first entry in the Atom feed is always a link to the Google News front page?
Since the same information is in the feed's link, it's kind of superfluous. Is there some reason for this or is it just a mistake?
They appear to use NFE for the feeds. Is this a default in NFE?
The RSS feed does not appear to have this issue.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/30/14 41249&tid=217&tid=95&tid=155
But that would mean...
-Head Explodes-
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Incidentally, I found out about Google News' RSS feeds from an item in my Yahoo News feed that I subscribed to solely because Google News didn't have an RSS feed. Now I can get rid of it. Thanks Yahoo!
After using the Google and Yahoo RSS feeds side by side for a day, I'm definitely sticking with the Google one. There are a wider variety of sources, unlike Yahoo's content partners or whatever's going on there. Pretty pictures inside the feed help as well. What really put Google over th edge is that I can get my own customized feed that has the entertainment section stripped out, and more interesting stuff in it's place. Can My Yahoo do this? I'd never actually played around with it until just now. It'd probably be a better idea to integrate some of the customization features from My Yahoo into the main Yahoo News site so it's a bit more discoverable.
When I go to news.google.com, the page doesn't have a
element in the <head>. That means that browsers cannot automatically announce the existence of an RSS feed. It would be nice if I could use such a link to get an equivalent RSS/Atom feed that matches my customized news topic selection. (The RSS/Atom links on the left side of the page don't reflect my customizations.)
I'm a bit surprised at that, since Google has a reputation for making things as standard and user-friendly as possible. Perhaps that's why it's still Beta. (Where do I post feedback? Does Google have a crawler that indexes this gripe and reports it to their developers?)
The new feeds look GREAT in Plucker on my PDA. I wrote a little web-based tool that takes any rss/rdf/atom/opml/nntp resource and converts it to validated HTML, which I can then directly manipulate (and in my case, turn into Plucker format).
You can see some screenshots of what it looks like on my Palm.
Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?
Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?
In terms of a security risk, its only as bad as bittorrent. Sure somebody could modify their client to suck up the IPs of everyone that is interested in that information. Worse, somebody will probably figure out a way of adding a payload (although again, with proper hashing, and encryption that becomes increasingly difficult).
Could this be the killer app that gets us all hooked on IPv6?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
It's more about XML, I believe. News is a unique content source, as opposed to static content. For instance, Moby Dick is static content. Moby Dick in XML might not be that useful. RSS, or xml, on the other hand is raw annotated content. Unlike a webpage, it doesn't need an html interpreter (browser) to read, but can feed directly into applications, including offline readers (I recommend Avantgo if you really want mobile news... it installs on most palm/pocket pc devices).
The advantage is that rss is really different. If you look at the XHTML specification, RSS is only really different from a web page in the names of the tags it uses. It's just a file format. It doesn't cure cancer. It won't make your teeth whiter. But, for people that aren't html standards compliant, they at least get their feet wet in a standards compliant format for their content, thus increasing the universal access to their public data.
And by that measure, Google has increased universal access to their data as well. Such feeds might be used directly by rss readers. For the most part, though, the feeds will be used as parts of applications.
For instance, you could set up a company RSS feed to search for all news on your company, and feed it directly into the internal e-mail system. Or, if you are like me, you can integrate RSS news feeds into other web-applications, like Google Maps. Prior to this, I hooked Yahoo's RSS news feeds (by location) to the Google maps, so that you could view top news geographically, instead of chronologically.
Without RSS and other XML standards, scraping websites is very inaccurate, and much more bandwidth/time consuming. Parsing an XML document is far easier than a raw, unorganized document. With a proper cache setup (like Magpie for PHP), small sites can utilize a LOT of RSS content, which would only take a tiny amount of bandwidth. Compare that to a site scraping a Google search result, then scraping all resulting pages, and trying to pick out things such as the "headline", "publishing date", "author", etc.
Those are some of the advantages to RSS/XML, though I'm sure someone even more familiar with the standards could go more in depth.
I8-D
We should note that Yahoo news has implemented this features months ago. Just make a search and the orange xml button will appear in the results page. You can even use rss auto-discovery (the rss feed in describe in the html meta tags). If you are a bloglines user, you can click in their bookmarklet, and automagically subscribe to the feed.