|
Now Google is starting to rock. Having wrapped its mind around RSS as, possibly, a desirable tool for users, Google
shaped up the personalized home page and now, in the best move yet,
woven RSS into
Google News (English version only). This milestone development exceeds Yahoo!’s
implementation of RSS in Yahoo! News. You have three choices:
- Grab a feed of a news section, such as Health or Sports.
- Grab a feed of a search result (remember to sort by date if you want the feed to behave like other feeds in the
newsreader).
- Grab a feed of an entire personalized Google News page.
It’s the second option that’s really useful. It took me mere minutes to create a Google News folder in Bloglines,
then stuff it with the feeds of all the searches that were on my customized page. Now, instead of going to Google News
and clicking through those searches, I have them all in one window. If I wanted to mush the searches together (as I
might if they were similar search strings) I could create a customized page of those searches and take the resulting
feed—more work, but doable.
I don’t know if this is part of Google’s Fusion initiative, but if so, it is the first feature to give me a buzz.
NOTE: The feeds seem to max out at 10 items per view, even when I set the Bloglines date back a week. Setting Google
Preferences to 100 results per page doesn’t help. I can understasnd the need for some limit, otherwise Google could
throw thousands of hits into the feed. But shouldn’t it be set by the user somehow? And if not, shouldn’t it be higher
than 10?
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.
| 
