Google Becomes an RSS Aggregator

August 10, 2005, 11:48 AM —  ITworld.com, Ecommerce in Action — 

Google has announced an important addition to its News service - Google News Feeds. The new option lets users get the latest news using a news reader. It also provides a free and open way to access news in an XML-based format.

Just as eBay and Amazon have solidified their dominance by providing an API that developers can build upon, it's likely that providing news feeds will make Google's service more popular than ever.

Google Feeds

You can now get an RSS or Atom news feed for any Google News section. Google is providing standard feeds for its main categories: Top News, World, US, Business, Sci/Tech, Health, Sports and Entertainment.

In addition to these, you can do a search at the site, and then copy the news feed links that are provided on the left-hand side of the news page.

Alternately, you can query Google News dynamically and get back results as a news feed. Just customize this URL as needed:

http://news.google.com/news?q=searchterm&output=rss

Replace "searchterm" with whatever you want to get news on. Options for output are rss and atom.

Terms of use

Google is inviting users to make non-commercial use of the feeds on websites. It requires users to:

* Attribute the feeds to Google News

* Attribute each news item to its provider

* Include a link to the Google News cluster for each news item

* Identify the search terms used to generate the feed

Details are provided at Google's site.

While these terms of use don't allow feed information to be incorporated into commercial sites, it's likely that the feeds will be popular among bloggers and non-commercial sites.

The news feeds may also be useful for companies that want to track news by topics. The custom news feeds can be loaded into a desktop or web-based news reader. In this way, users can track news items that include trademarks, products or company names.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Google News Feeds

ITworld.com, Ecommerce in Action

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Resources
White Paper

Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.

Webcast

Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.

White Paper

Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.

Free stuff

Enterprise 2.0 Implementation
By Aaron C. Newman, Jeremy Thomas
Published by McGraw-Hill
Learn more!

Deploying Cisco Wide Area Application Services
By Zach Seils, Joel Christner
Published by Cisco Press
Learn more!

Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

More Resources