OK, this is old news. Admittedly, I was slow on the uptake.
I just noticed that you can now get Google News Alerts by feed. (What’s a feed?) Apparently this new service just launched over the summer.
So what? Well, now you can do a keyword search on Google News (a free service which aggregates news stories and press releases from thousands of sources). Then you can subscribe to a feed that will continually deliver to you a steady stream of new matches for your query. These results will come to you through your feed reader so they won’t clutter up your in-box.
Here’s some how-to info and a little background on the puzzling history of Google and feeds…
HOW TO: After you do a Google News search, look on the left side of the page. Click one of the feed options (RSS or Atom – just two different feed formats. You get the same content either way.) When that happens you’ll see an ugly page of code. Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything wrong. Feeds are still a bit klunky that way. Just copy the URL of that page and subscribe to that URL in your feed reader. Then you’ll be able to read feed results in a very user-friendly format.
Are Google News feeds better than daily e-mail alerts? That depends on your needs and tastes.
Some people really like Google’s daily e-mail news alerts – and that’s cool. Other people prefer feeds. Feeds do offer the advantage of capturing all these alerts in one place, so you don’t have to shuffle through a lot of separate e-mails to scan them. Also feeds allow you to receive new results as they arise in Google News – so you don’t have to wait for a one-a-day summary. If you’re trying to follow a fast-breaking topic, feeds might be the better option.
HISTORY:It used to be you could only get Google News Alerts by e-mail – which seemed odd since Yahoo News has offered search-based feeds for a long time. It’s not usual for Google to be so slow to capitalize on a fast-growing new communication tool.
Oddly, the Google News Alert explanation page still only mentions the e-mail option. There is a separate explanation page for Google News feeds, but the e-mail page doesn’t even link to it. Weird.
I’m not sure when Google debuted this service, but I’m glad they did. For quite a while I was irked over Google’s baffling resistance to feeds.
Last year Google even went to the extent of legally threatening someone who dared to “scrape” Google news feeds. I found that hilarious, since Google itself is an empire built on content scraped from other sites. But law and reality rare coincide.
Anyway, enjoy your Google News feeds. It’s about time.
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