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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.
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?)