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.)"

Comments

It seems that Slashdot..

[speights_pride!]

..has always been plugged into the RSS feed anyway ;-)

What is the point of RSS?

[Jaruzel]

So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS.

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 /.), but in general I fail to see why the whole community is hailing RSS as the second coming of the Internet.

Just my 2p's worth.

-Jar.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Lisandro]

Well, it's not that RSS doesn't have a point (it does), it just gets awfully misused. Take podcasts, for example; why bother setting up an RSS/Atom feed with mp3 files when you could do it as easily with a simple web page?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[the_unknown_soldier]

Don't be silly. The op had a point but the only exception to it that I have found IS podcasting. I don't want to have to click to download an mp3, and drag it into my player and then onto my dap, i want it to be automatic so that when i wake up my dap is updated with the latest. Rss makes this a far simpler process.

Opening my rss agregator is just as easy as opening my web browser, only my browser gives me more information.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[TheFlyingGoat]

On my HTPC, I pull RSS feeds of news and sports scores each night. It gives me a quick and easy way to get the daily headlines all in one spot. Same as people who use aggregators... it's all about convenience.

Your bandwidth example is faulty. First of all, most people don't have their aggregators set to update every 5 minutes. Second, if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, you'd know that content takes very little bandwidth compared to images and markup code. Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute. For a popular site, the processing savings would be significant.

PDA applications are a great example of RSS put to good use. Sure, you have to connect to read the full content, but the headlines are presented in a simple manner that even crappy PDAs can handle. Far better than downloading ALL of the content on a site, or requiring a constant connection to the Internet.

There's MANY niche environments that RSS feeds are perfectly suited for. They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client. Why NOT have them around?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[strider44]

Because it's a standard way of syndicating information in a way that can be reformatted. With an RSS feed the information can be placed inside a browser, a news ticker or a widget on Karamba with equal ease. Each of these have wildly different formatting and RSS is used to accomplish this, whereas with HTML it's either impossible or very hard, having to write a manual script for each and every site which would break as soon as the site is changed.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[aussie_a]

I have failed to see the point of RSS.

I don't know what the "official point" of it is, but I have a great many uses for it. One main use I have is I have several feeds on my homepage and I can at a glance see if they've updated and/or see if I might be interested in their update.

Another use for it is to open up one program and it will tell me if any blogs I read (and there are many that I do) have updated since I last checked. Instead of having to open up over 20 pages (most of which remain unupdated for months at a time), I just open up "one page".

Another use is I keep track of new e-books on this site and I'll keep the items in my reader. Once a week or so, I go through all the items, delete most of them, keep the items for books that sound interesting*. That way whenever I want to buy a book, I can just open up my client and look through the items I've saved (which are obvious as they're unread).

* Actually I lie. I put the ones that sound interesting in a relational database. But you don't HAVE to do that, I'm just anal like that. Well, that and trying to keep track of my free e-books is very, very difficult.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[isorox]

One word: Live Bookmarks.

Clik the orange blob in the bottom right, subscribe to the slashdot RSS feed, and drop it in your bookmarks (or on your toolbar). No need to visit slashdot to see if there's any interesting stories, as they'll be in your bookmarks.

I do the same with BBC News too, I can get an idea of what's happening by simply dropping down a list and checking the headlines. If a story grabs my attention I click it and go straight to the story - no need to navigate the horrendus news.bbc.co.uk site (fine for the top 5-10 stories, but after that it's easy to miss stuff)

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[hachete]

I use the RSS feeds in Firefox to check the status of news items from Le Figaro, BBC and the New York Times.

I also use it to check if there are new items from Slashdot, PennyArcade and Megatokyo. The headlines are usually explicit enough to tell me if I want to go to the website or not, which saves me an important amount of time given that PennyArcade and MegaTokyo both take a while to download even on a corporate network.

Works for me. To me it's just a dynamic bookmark folder in Firefox, think of it like a news-ticker. I agree that RSS is not the second coming, just like "blogs" are just over-inflated home-pages. Although to hear the combatants of Atom V RSS (sometimes boiled down to one mega-corporation against one millionaire), you'd think that the lives of millions were at stake, particularly from the Atom camp. *sigh*

The interesting one is Slashdot. The feed from my work machine works. The feed to to my home machine worked a couple of times and has now stopped, in spite of the crap spouted on the Slashdot apology page on "why the Slashdot RSS feed isn't working for you". Maybe "they" only allow one nibble at a time?

Very cool

[ReformedExCon]

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!

Good thing

[kihjin]

FTGB: "And since feed reading can be addictive, don't forget to feed yourself after feeding your reader."

Well then, it seems having a refrigerator next to me will finally start paying off!

Google's Atom Feed

[pyrrhonist]

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.

Yahoo's had this for months now...

[Gopal.V]

Yahoo news , my.yahoo.com , search and alerts .. have all been RSS for quite some time.

I can imagine the irony of reading google news on my.yahoo.com (too bad /. banned my.yahoo).

Re:Yahoo's had this for months now...

[natrius]

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.

In case of Slashdotting

[CleverNickedName]

Here's the cache.

Advertising?

[zaguar]

Anyone else remember Google patenting RSS advertising?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/30/14 41249&tid=217&tid=95&tid=155

But that would mean...

-Head Explodes-

So heres hoping they do it RIGHT!!

[MrBandersnatch]

Ive been playing with RSS feeds a lot of late and seen a lot of half-assed solutions. Its ****** annoying to find an RSS feed for an area/site only to find they have commited one of the following ?-ups :-

1) No option to specify the number of results returned, returning to few results by default and putting a low cap on the max.
2) A feed but no "feed from search facility"
3) No pubDate information.
4) Feed intermitantly breaks because someone forgets to encode '&' or '' etc. in one or other fields.
5) Piling a **** load of HTML into the descripiton field (often leads to 4)

and theres more but those are the most annoying sins Ive seen recently.

Anyways this IS Google so I fully expect them to do it technically right...but I also fully expect them to limit the result set to 100 results - which is going to be useless to me and many others who might want RSS off google for more than just sticking into a aggregator!!

What? No link rel="alternate"?

[200_success]

When I go to news.google.com, the page doesn't have a

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="..." href="...">

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 point is Syndication

[danila]

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, Syndication being the key word. You can automatically move the news items around and do anything you want with them. You are no longer a hostage to the website designer.

For example, you can label stories as Todo or Check later in your mailer (such as M2), you can integrate stories from different sources in one interface, you can search many feeds at one, you can display the news in many innovative ways, from a newspaper-like interface to tag clouds. You can choose how often to read the new stories and not have to endure complex archive navigation at each site.

If you are only getting your information from a few sources, one or two mailing lists and a few sites, you can just read your e-mail from inbox, bookmark the sites and check them manually. But if you want to know everything about foobar and aren't content simply with visiting only www.foobarnews.com, only RSS can help.

RSS can provide you with the same level of service that used to cost real money (thousands of 000) when it was provided by marketing companies under the name of media monitoring.

RSS is the shadow of the future power of Semantic Web already available in one particular area - news and new materials online. It's not intended for reading only, it's intended for processing and organising. With RSS you can automatically process all kinds of content, from slashdot articles, to search alerts to CNN news, to articles on rarely updated niche site, to del.icio.us links and flickr photos. You don't have to do it manually, your browser (RSS reader) and a bunch of web apps can do it for you.

If you really don't see why RSS is important, your opionion is not even worth 2p. You should have politely asked "please explain to me, why am I missing here", not offered your opinion, which was uninformed and stupid.

Re:Google Moon!

[aussie_a]

If you go to maximal zoom, you'll finally see what the moon is made of!

Pixels?

Adding the Google Feed into Firefox

[Pablo El Vagabundo]

Google does not tell Firefox it has a feed, here is how to add it (ripped from the mozilla site):

Some sites don't tell Firefox that they support Live Bookmarks, even though they actually do. If you know the URL of a site's RSS feed (url ends with .rdf or .xml), you can manually create a Live Bookmark for the site. Go to the Bookmarks menu and select 'Manage Bookmarks'. Under the 'File Menu', select 'New Live Bookmark'. Create a name for the Live Bookmark and add the URL. New articles from that site will appear as Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

Pablo