Yahoo's News Image RSS Feeds

Okay, the good news is that Yahoo is offering RSS feeds of some of their slide shows. The bad news is that they don't mention it on their otherwise informative page about Yahoo News RSS (http://news.yahoo.com/rss.) (Yes, I know sometimes they'll put pictures in their news feeds, but I'm talking about feeds that are pretty much all pictures.)

The pages appear to be set up with this format of feed URL:

rss.news.yahoo.com/imgrss/xxx

With the xxx being replaced by either a number or a string of letters (most often a number.) The numbers look like that might stand for categories of photos -- 581 seems to stand for world news, 1778 for most popular, etc. (I'm not sure about this.)

Apparently you can go to Yahoo News' photo page at http://news.yahoo.com/photos and choose a category, then click on a link, then get the RSS feed, but how annoying. Besides, I like doing my RSS content searching by keyword.

So I went to Google and tried site:yahoo.com inurl:imgrss. This worked great (over 10,000 results!) until I realized that Google wouldn't let me search for words within these files. (And searching Google's blog search for these URLs came up bupkus.)

So I went to Yahoo and tried the same thing: site:yahoo.com inurl:imgrss. This time I got far fewer results (just over 900) but they were keyword searchable. A search for site:yahoo.com inurl:imgrss china got 71 results, including news feeds for table tennis, panda bears, and China/Taiwan relations. The feeds have photos with extensive captions. Click on a photo within a feed and you'll go straight to a Yahoo News page.

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