Chris says:
In short: Google news now has Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds for all the catagories and for custom news searchs.
Check it out.
Posted by jzawodn at August 09, 2005 12:00 AM
About. Damn. Time.
The description tags sure are a mess of HTML:
http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=h&output=rss
I guess they have finally caught up with Yahoo News. Why did it take so long?
http://news.yahoo.com/rss (has been around forever)
Google seem a bit slow these days. Spending too much time trying to buy houses in Atherton?
Computer Geek: No, we're too busy trying out gold plated digital escargot forks, dahling. I'll pass on the comment about the description field, that could break some html out there.
I think there's a major flaw in the implementation of category feeds. They don't use a consistent id in the feed for their grouping system, so aggregators are adding a new item everytime each grouping adds a new article (at least the few I tried). You'll easily end up with hundreds of articles on the same topic, which is fine for keyword feeds, but not category feeds. So the category feeds won't be very useful for serious RSS users due to the noise. Yahoo News category feeds only have a few sources so they don't really have to deal with it.
Now if only Technorati would have RSS feeds that could be tapped into.
Good neews indeed. However it is not without flaws:
1. Why ATOM 0.3? 1.0 would be better choice.
2. Feeds does not pass validation with feedvalidator.org. For instance they use HTML in title.
3. No categories/taxonomies/tags.
4. I do not see them specifying sources of the items, even though they in TOS they ask to " attribute each news item to its provider, using the provider name as it appears in the Google News feed."
But still, this is a good news and steip in the right direction.
Wow! these thigns are herendous. Has anyone got a completely WORKING RSS->(X)HTML for these things yet? I wrote my own RSS decoder after playing with lastRSS for a while and still no dice. I get all kinds of funky messed up characters. I think google really needs to address some of these problems or give us a working PHP example to parse their feed into HTML. Until then I think I give up on these feeds. Bleh..
I can't seem to consume the news feed with anything other than a feed reader. I'm trying to use a script (xmlhttp/asp) to get the feed, transform it using xslt and then display it on a web page. But I get a permission denied message similar to the one I got a while ago when I tried screenscraping the Google news page ;-)
I may have got something wrong but any experiences out there would be interesting to hear...
Finally someone adressing the real problem with RSS aggreagtors: Ranking. Google seems to rank posts based on relevance. Too bad the site is so slow and buggy that we can really try it.
In the meantime, we have a smart aggregator that learns how you consume content, and ranks incoming posts based on what's most important to you. Some of our users reported reading time cut in half. Have you tried it yet?. By the way, I'll grant a beta account to all of you that email me at support at searchfox dot com and mention code xb17.
