Google Gears Up to Offer Web Search Results as RSS

By Jason Harris (@harrisja) Oct 10, 2008 Comments

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Ever wanted to stay on top of Google search results in an easy and manageable way? Google has long offered its users the ability to subscribe to search results via email. The company has recently announced its intention to soon offer search results via RSS feeds as well. It will be an extension of Google Alerts.

Staying Up To Date

Subscribing to Google Web search results enables you to stay aware of Web content that relates to specific topics you are interested in. By employing Google search Web alerts, companies and organizations can maintain a pulse on what the Internet is saying about their brand or company.

Why RSS Matters

Google has long given us the ability to use email to subscribe to search results, but RSS gives us another option to stay current. If you have a popular search term that you are tracking, having email set up as your alert delivery mechanism can quickly fill up your email box with dozens or even hundreds of messages a day. RSS gives users more flexibility into how they handle the Google search results.

Also, since RSS is a great way to aggregate content between Websites, a company can have an RSS feed of all the latest Google search results on a specific topic embedded in their Website or content management system.

Similar Google Services

Google already offers RSS feeds of search results from their popular Google News site.

Also, as Search Engine Land points out, Google is currently the only major search engine not offering RSS feeds of web search results. As many CMSWire readers probably may know, popular enterprise search engines such as Microsoft Office SharePoint currently offer RSS for search results for SharePoint users.

It is a positive development to see Google soon offering this capability. RSS is quickly becoming a standard tool for content aggregation and being able to track Google search results using RSS will be incredibly useful.