ReadWriteWeb

Xerox PARC famously invented the graphical user interface (GUI) for modern computers, then just as famously failed to capitalize on it. Now called "PARC, a Xerox company," it continues to innovate to this day in a variety of domains - including web applications. PARC (which stands for Palo Alto Research Center) tackles large computing problems and its newest consumer web service is no exception.

Information overload is something that afflicts web users on a daily basis. PARC wants to fix it with a product called Kiffets, a topic-based news aggregator which quietly launched in beta recently.

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.