Google introduces RSS/Atom feeds on Google News |
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Wed, 10 Aug 2005 11:05
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Google has decided to enhance its Google News aggregation service by the introduction of RSS and Atom feeds. Google had initially given a step brotherly treatment to the RSS feeds but bowing to the increasing popularity of this format, Google decided that the News segment would benefit enormously by the inclusion of these feeds.
Both the Really Simple Syndication, and Atom are document formats based on XML that make it easier for users to track the latest news posted on their favorite Web sites. On Google News, these formats can be accessed by subscribing for either RSS or Atom feed from any of the seven main segments that the News aggregation service tracks. Users also have the option of creating customized RSS news feeds or checking up on the alerts that they have already created. The Atom 0.3 or RSS 2.0 versions are available as feed options on the Google News site.
"With the new feature, users can be updated for all news Web sites they're interested in one location," Debbie Jaffe, product marketing manager for Google's consumer offerings said. However, there was no comment about why Google had instructed a British national, Julian Bond to stop creating his own feed from the headlines displayed on Google News in April 2004. These headlines were then displayed on Bond's own site, Ecademy.com. When contacted, Bond explained that Google's action on RSS came in the wake of the fact that several news sites were republishing the results of his RSS feed from Google, "I wrote a scraper that did the search and generated an RSS feed from it," he said. However, he can now rest easy because Google has made that job easier.
The popularity of RSS feeds can be gauged from the fact that Google was compelled to take this step after requests from users, "We've launched this service because we've had a lot of requests from Google users to support RSS and Atom," a Google spokeswoman said. Whatever the reason behind launching the service, Google News users' are the ultimate beneficiaries. The RSS or the Atom feeds are only available for English Language edition of the Google News and are currently limited to the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, U.K. and India editions.
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