Google News and RSS Feeds

My husband walked in as I was in the kitchen making lunch (hummus on rye and iced tea.) As I moved around the room I did a Jules Feifferesque dance. Slow with a lot of sway-ey bendy stuff.

He watched me for a moment. "Are you all right?"

I tossed the hummus back in the fridge and pirouetted (slowly). "This is my happy dance with lunch creation. It's a celebration of the fact that we haven't run out of hummus and the bread isn't moldy yet. Oh, and that Google News is now offering RSS feeds."

He kept watching. "Usually when you do a happy dance it's a little more active." He meant spastic but he was being nice.

"Well, it's taken them a long time. And this dance also notes the fact that Google's Web API is still in a release dated August 30, 2002. I don't feel I can be too ebullient."

He grunted and went back downstairs to look up "ebullient". I cut the sandwich in half, picked up my tea, and went into the office to tell you all about Google News' RSS and Atom feeds.

Google News is in fact offering two kinds of feeds: keyword-based and category based. You can get a list of the category-based feeds at http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html .

The keyword-based feeds you can get after doing a search. When you run a search and click on the RSS and Atom links on the left of the results page, you'll see feeds for your search.

When I first started playing with this two things popped into my mind. First thing: "At last, a cheap way to get an RSS feed from Business Wire!" (and really, any other news source that doesn't ordinarily offer RSS feeds but is indexed by Google News.)

So I merrily popped in source:business_wire__press_release_ as my query. And got nothing; Google News doesn't allow you to do source-only searches. So I checked the domain name of Business Wire (businesswire.com) and tried again ( source:business_wire__press_release_ inurl:businesswire).

Bingo! Sort of. I got nine results. I looked at some of the result URLs, found a pattern in it (the use of the word "portal" and "google") and tried again. This time I got a few more results but nothing like what I expected. It also seemed that instead of looking in the URL, the search engine was looking in the body of the press release.

So I decided to stop being so damned clever and searched for "business wire" source:business_wire__press_release_ , which gave me over 11,000 results. Sort it by date, grab the RSS feed, and I'm in business. If you want to limit your feed to a single source, try to find a common set of words in it, like from a story header or a copyright notice, and add that to your source: syntax.

If you can't, resort to the "the OR if" trick -- add that phrase to your source: search. For example if OR the source:cnn. Google News will tell you it's dropping the because it's too common a word, but you'll get over 3,000 results for this search, versus something over a thousand for if source:cnn.

I would also use the RSS feed generator with one of my favorite lesser-known Google News syntax: location:. Use location: and the postal code of a state to get news sources for that state. So if I wanted to get stories on business bankruptcies in Montana, I'd do business bankruptcy location:mt . Ahhhh... keyword-specific, location-specific news feeds. Yummy.

It's taken a long time, but I'm so glad Google is offering this. And with Atom support too. Nice!

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