Syndicating Google Search Results

Converting Google results to RSS suitable for syndication or incorporation into your own web site.

RSS is an XML-based syndication format used by web sites to provide abstracts of their content for open-ended syndication. RSS-syndicated content is incorporated into web sites, aggregated by news services, and consumed by RSS news readers similar in form to the Usenet newsreaders of old.

This hack converts sets of Google search results to RSS format for syndication. The C# .NET source code and full instructions are available at http://www.razorsoft.net/weblog/stories/2002/04/13/google2rss.html.

Running the Hack

Google2RSS is a command-line utility. To run it, you’ll need to have a Windows machine with the .NET Framework installed. If you want to compile it from source yourself, you’ll need to have the .NET Framework SDK too. It accepts a multitude of command-line switches, all of which are documented on the Google2RSS site.

Here’s a sample run of Google2RSS, a SafeSearch query Google API :

google2rss.exe -key "12BuCK13mY5h0E/34KN0cK@ttH3Do0R" -query "Google API" -
safesearch true -filter true -title "Tracking the Google API" -link http://
www.example.com/API -description "Tracking the Google API Mentions in 
Google" -webMaster info@example.com -outfile "googleapi.rss"

This will produce an RSS document fit for consumption by any number of RSS tools, applications, and services. Drop it into your web server’s document directory and announce its whereabouts ...

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