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

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?

[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?

[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.

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).