Legal Research

Google adding RSS feeds for web search results: mixed emotions

By Jason

As reported by Search Engine Land, Read Write Web, and others, Google is adding RSS feeds to web search search results. Thay already have RSS feeds available for News, Blogs, Patents, and other searches. While I love using RSS feeds for monitoring the web and use it very effectively for competitive intelligence, marketing, business development, and other research purposes, I think the Google web search RSS feeds may be a kind of mixed bag.

Steve Matthews commentary on SLAW is the best I’ve seen on this so far. As he notes I think many people will be be surprised by the amount of spam and poor hits they get. I should also note that on some of Google’s RSS feeds I also get duplicate content, and old content quite often (presumeably because of changes made to the original RSS source). I can’t even imagine how much content I’ll have to wade through without advanced filtering options.

Steve also makes some great observations about the potential uses for a such a tool. Being able to track links going to a site, new results on a particular domain, are just a few of the ptentially great uses for this. I look forward to seeing how they implement it.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on October 13, 2008 (boomark / email).