Google launches RSS for Google News

By Charlene Li

Google now has the ability to add RSS/Atom feeds from Google News. Users will have the ability to add three types of feeds: 1) Google News section feed; 2) Google News search results feed; and 3) feed from a customized news page. Interestingly, Google offers two feed options, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 (I believe, in a nod to their ongoing support of the Atom standard).

Yahoo! News has had a similar feature for quite a while now, although it doesn’t allow users to add a feed of their customized news page. But Yahoo! does make it very easy to add news sections and search result feeds to My Yahoo! – Google still requires you to manually copy and paste the feed URL into its personalized home page service, although I expect that this will change shortly. Ask Jeeves also has feeds from news, but only for categories, while MSN has RSS feeds coming from its general search results (which interestingly, I nudged the freshness index within SiteBuilder to return listings that have been added most recently to the index – check out the feed I created on a search for “discovery landing”.)

So with almost every other major player doing this, it was about time that Google followed suit. From our research, we found that RSS users are news junkies, with 43% of all adult RSS users in the US visit a national news site at least once a week, compared to just 14% of non-RSS using online adults that do the same.