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Google News RSS and Atom Feeds Reviewed

Google News RSS and Atom Feeds Reviewed

News of Google News providing RSS and Atom feeds from their categorical and news search results has led to some quite favorable coverage on the Internet from some people who feeds are quite important to, bloggers. Search Engine Journal covered the news early yesterday morning after reading an entry from Jeremy Zawondy’s personal blog. Now, as usual, the news has escalated to the point where the major publishers have picked it up and we thought it would be a great idea to recap our own and others’ critiques of Google News feeds.

Google News’s feeds offering is a rather nifty tool for two reasons. One being that it’s more or less Google’s first leap into syndicating news or search results via RSS or Atom (for example, here’s the RSS feed for Search Engine Journal stories on Google News), a step that many of the major and alternative search engines have already taken (especially Yahoo). The second reason is that as a fan of Google News I can now simply click through my desktop or browser based RSS aggregator instead of leaving sites I’m currently using in order to check out the latest headlines on Google News.

How will Google benefit from this? Well, although Google News is already regarded as the one of the top news portals for up to date news aggregation and search results, it is experiencing major competition from other news sites such as Topix.net and Yahoo News. Add Moreover News, MSN Newsbot, and Technorati or Feedster into the equation and you have a field of competition which are all working on cutting edge syndication techniques and partnerships with larger web portals, newspaper sites, local search and blogs.

Google News is now taking its first step of marketing itself outside of the Google domain by opening up its news search and feature clustering to a multitude of sites and developers waiting to get their hands on the feeds. Do not be surprised to see Google AdSense contextual ads integrated into Google News RSS feeds once the syndication takes off. Google AdSense has been working quite hard on moving into the RSS advertising field and the Google News feeds will be the ideal location to showcase their relevant advertising. The following are some other thoughts on Google News Feeds from around the web.

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger : ProBloggers and RSS addicts everywhere are jumping up and down in their boxer shorts because Google News has finally added RSS feeds to its service! Wooohooo! I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes adding a series of feeds to my Bloglines account and am looking forward to seeing how it works. Hopefully this will eliminate quite a few News Alert emails each day and speed up my blogging.

MarketingStudies.net’s RSS Diary : It finally happened. Google now provides RSS feeds for all news.google.com searches, bringing you latest Google News content straight to your RSS reader. Perhaps more important is that Google allows webmasters to display syndicated Google News content on their sites, albeit under a noncommercial use policy.

Luis Suarez : The reason why this is big news is not just because here we have got another large corporation embracing the usage of RSS to enhance end-users’ web surfing experience but more than anything else because it is about time that Google realises that Really Simple Syndication has become much more powerful than originally expected and cannot be ignored, nor denied. So you might as well embrace it and try to make the best out of it.

And that is exactly what Google has done. They are now offering RSS feeds for their News service and not only that but they have also added Atom support (Talking about following web standards). However, something tells me that this may be just the beginning as we have seen how Google has also embraced RSS feeds in their Personalised Google Home, so that people can subscribed to their favourite resources from there, too.

So expect to see some further news in this respect as I do not think Google would just stop at that. And if not time will tell. For the time being, though, it is now time to subscribe to some of the feeds in order to keep up to date with what is happening around the world, business and technology. Well done, folks ! About time, but well done !

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SEJ STAFF Loren Baker Founder at Foundation Digital

Loren Baker is the Founder of SEJ, an Advisor at Alpha Brand Media and runs Foundation Digital, a digital marketing ...

Google News RSS and Atom Feeds Reviewed

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