Google Removes Alerts, RSS Buttons from News

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / July 20, 2009 2:32 PM / 10 Comments

RSS feeds for Google News search results have been broken for about three weeks, according to complaints in the company's help forum. Three weeks ago a Google engineer said they expected the problem to be fixed in about a week. Now the company has simply removed the links in the results page sidebar to both RSS and Google Alerts. Oops.

Inbal Drukker, a senior associate at Google News, said on the first and sixth of July that there are "engineering changes" underway to "improve Google News." So what seems like a loss today could end up for the better in the long run, but for now there seems to be a problem.

RSS, Atom and email subscriptions for new news search results used to appear in the bottom of the left hand column of search results pages. Now there is nothing there. Both products are still available, if troubled, via the browser's RSS autodetection icon in the address bar and the Google Alerts product page.

Update: Marjolein Hoekstra points out that there is a link to create a Google Alert now at the very bottom of the search results page, as well as one to create an iGoogle gadget for a search, but still no RSS link displayed like there used to be.

Thanks to Russ Castronovo for bringing this to our attention.

Comments

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Google Alerts has become useless anyhow. I've deleted all of my alerts.

Posted by: Jorge Escobar | July 20, 2009 3:19 PM

yeah, I too gave up on Google Alerts a long time ago. It's one of those things that seemed like a great idea, but in practice it just clogged my inbox with irrelevant or duplicate results.

Posted by: Brent | July 20, 2009 4:51 PM

I still have a Google News RSS feed I'm subscribed to that works perfectly fine. So as they've taken them away they still seem to work if you were already subscribed to them.

Posted by: Scott | July 20, 2009 6:20 PM

While I noticed that the link disappeared, you can still grab the feed by clicking on the RSS icon on Firefox. And the feeds still work for me as well.

Posted by: Steven Cohen | July 20, 2009 7:09 PM

First I recognized that you could still get the RSS feeds when you were logged into Google with a personal account, but since one week that also disappeared. The Fire fox solution is easy to use and works fine. Thanks Steven.

Posted by: Hajo Libor | July 21, 2009 6:55 AM

I may be anal, but I find Google Alerts useful precisely because it returns me "junk" and spam results for a product I created. I then dutifully file Google spam reports on every junk link. This is a cheap and simple way of helping to ensure that authentic links for my product retain their search ranking.

Posted by: Gluefreak | July 21, 2009 10:29 AM

Ugh, they're turning into Yahoo. Watch for them to start giving and taking away features and re-designing peoples' customized tools like an out-of-control autarch. They say it's going to improve things in the long run... yeah, right.

Posted by: kaolin | July 21, 2009 4:42 PM

This is huge news for the 12 of us who read Google News via RSS.

Posted by: Ryan Miller | July 21, 2009 10:45 PM

thanks for article very sesli chat

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Posted by: TBTinBoy | December 4, 2009 11:06 PM