Finally! Google to Offer RSS Feeds for Web Search Results
A rumor that's been floating around the web lately is that Google will offer RSS feeds for new results in basic web search. Today Search Engine Land confirmed that Google will "soon" offer this functionality. Why is this big news? Because there's no better way to keep track of new mentions of a company, person or concept online than through RSS.
As Search Engine Land's Matt McGee points out in his post, Google is the only major web search engine to not offer feeds for basic web search, as they do in blog search and news. We'd previously recommended Live.com for web search feeds, but who really cares about Live.com search results? They're terrible. Google feeds are good news.
Google says that the new feeds will be part of the Google Alerts product, which currently delivers e-mail alerts for new search results in web, blog and other result types. Google Alerts are widely used but are, we'd argue, like training wheels for people not yet comfortable with RSS feeds. There's nothing wrong with that, but many of us want our feeds.
Though blogs and news sites are of growing importance, there's still nothing quite like good old Web Search for getting a broad picture of who is linking where and what kind of online mentions are occurring. Google says it cannot confirm when the web search feeds will be available.
We hope that Google web search feeds will include "site:" searches for new mentions of keywords inside particular domains (Live and Yahoo do), and that they will deliver nice clean direct URLs - which Live.com feeds do but Yahoo search feeds do not.
There's still no alerts or feeds available for Google Image Search, probably because the index is so woefully behind the web at large.
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Great, have been waiting for this
Posted by: Lasse
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October 8, 2008 1:45 PM
Very cool.
Posted by: Hutch Carpenter
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October 8, 2008 1:47 PM
A feature that probably will come in hand. :)
Posted by: Bruno Miguel
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October 8, 2008 1:51 PM
I'm betting that subscribing to saved searches in a feedreader will quickly become burdensome. There'll be too much crap to sort through. We'll need something to sit on top of that and sort "the important" out from the "can be safely ignored" results.
Yes, finally! This is a great addition for many people and for many purposes. I personally am happy about it. :)
If only google would offer a decent backlink search query. You could have an rss feed of new links as they appear.
OMG, sooo many Yahoo! Pipes to update!!
I'm not clear how well a regular Google search feed will handle the chronological element of search feeds. That is, let's assume a search feed for "Kindle" will return the top 10 Google hits in a feed. Tomorrow, the top 10 results are likely to be exactly the same (how often to the top results for any given query change?). So what will a feed show? All new results (likely to be way more than 10)? Some mix of relevant new results? It's a tougher problem than it seems on the surface...
Posted by: Josh Bancroft
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October 8, 2008 2:24 PM
@Josh, it sounds like it's based on the alert system, so it will be a list of new pages matching that query. So the search feed shouldn't return the top 10 google hits but the 10 newest hits. If it supports link: and site: it will be pretty cool.
Posted by: Shawn McCollum
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October 8, 2008 2:32 PM
That is totally awesome!
Posted by: Clay Newton
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October 8, 2008 2:38 PM
allth.at has been doing this for years...
Great to know that.
Would be a great feature!
Sweet!
Posted by: Anthony K. Valley ©
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October 8, 2008 3:28 PM
That's pretty awesome but not half as awesome as
your blog excellent work.I'm going to bounce around
Thanks
Awesome news, for many in our user community.
In all honesty you must wonder what took Google so long. This idea of including rss feeds is what we call in the potato business, "a spud in one"!!
Thanks for another great post
it was a long time coming!
Jesse W.
http://www.churchofcowherd.com
@jabancroft good point, i've been thinking about that too. what i think is: Isn't Friendfeed a search engine that delivers results in chronological order? the results it delivers are different than google's because its universe its different. it'll be interesting to see how FF's search offer evolves
Posted by: Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarri
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October 8, 2008 7:29 PM
"no better way to keep track of new mentions of a company" -- Google Alerts?
Good news indeed.
Sorry, but I'm not getting this. What value is created by reading this content in a newsreader versus reading it in a Google Alert as you can do now?
Wow, an RSS Feed, how cool is that!
www.anonymity.at.tc
its a good news with gooogle serp rss... all my job will become more easy with this
Spank yer dink FilthyRichmond.com
Yes,today I've heared this news yet!
I like pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
But will the results of the feed go past 1000?
I'd like not only site: and link: searches, but maps/local and google.co.uk but just plain old google.com will be a good start.
Posted by: Andy Murdoch
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October 9, 2008 8:01 AM
How long has Google been offering RSS feeds in Blogsearch?
I have been using this for about a month to keep up with terms that I want the latest news on.
This is real powerful stuff and could be used in marketing in so many ways.
But think about this, what if Google added a FriendConnect widget to Blogsearch? We could chat thru comments with our Google social friends and add friends to our Google social network right in Blogsearch.
Why could Google do this? Because the search term would have a unique RSS feed.
This could be the beginning of Google adding social features to search engine results.
If only Google would finally add FriendConnect to Blogger blogs as they promised almost six weeks ago maybe FriendConnect would move ahead and we could begin to really see what Google is doing.
Awesome. A very welcome move...
That's good news. We already had Feedmysearch, which I tried but doesn't work (refer to my blog for the story). I love Google Alerts, but would like to read them in Google Reader. This will do the trick!
Excellent if it´s available widely, it will allow a broader experience and if offers a parameter and an option.
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SQL / Web 2/ Web Analytics/ Small Business
http://ittechguys.blogspot.com
This will be a nice improvement on google alerts, and I guess will also be used a lot by automated rss-to-website content builders.
thats really big actually!