Google News Offers RSS and Atom Feeds
Google News has added RSS and Atom news feeds to their news category sections and Google News search results after ‘years’ of demand for this service. New Google news feeds can also be customized based on a users’ personalized Google News page. The Google News feeds are designed for non-commercial use and direct the end user directly to the site which generated the story, and not only to Google News results.
The terms of service also demand that if a publisher incorporates the feeds onto a web site, the publisher must attribute the feeds to Google News, attribute each news item to its provider, using the provider name as it appears in the Google News feed, include a link to the Google News cluster of related articles for each news item, using the link provided in the Google News feed and also identify the search terms used to generate the feed. Normal users can simply subscribe to Google News RSS feeds in their web aggregator of choice.
This 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. Mix Google News with the mapping API and Google Local, and you basically have Topix.net on steroids or a replacement for the evening news.
In addition, 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.
