Google Becomes an RSS Aggregator

August 10, 2005 —

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

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