Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

From a Search Engine

The current popular search engines have many great features, but they don’t usually provide any form of feed for search results. Such a feed is extremely useful for people trying to keep track of specific search topics (for example, their name).

Google

I personally host a Google-to-RSS service, which you are free to use. It’s at http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/google_to_rss.html. To use it, simply add your search request to the end of the URL http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=. For example:

http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=ben%20hammersley

Now, subscribe to that URL in your newsreader.

Note that I’m running this service from my own Google API key, which has a limit of 1,000 queries a day. If you’d like to help out, you can get your own key from http://www.google.com/apis/ and use it with your own queries. Add it to the URL with a &k=123456789 attribute, like this:

http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=ben%20hammersley&k=123456789

The source code for this service is discussed in Chapter 10.

Google News

Google News searches can also be turned into feeds via a service hosted by Julian Bond, found at http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php.

That page has a form to help generate the feed’s URL, or you can make it up yourself with this pattern:

http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?num=number_of_items&q=your_query

Note that this Google News service is for personal aggregators only and not for redisplay on another web site. The ...