Accoding to Matt McGee at Search Engine Land, Google will soon start offering RSS feeds for search results as an extension of Google Alerts. McGee writes:
The addition of RSS alerts was first picked up by Amit Agarwal, who found it mentioned in an October 1st Wall Street Journal article where author Katherine Boehret wrote, “In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails.”
In an email today, a Google spokesperson told us: “While I can’t be more specific about an ETA, I can confirm the launch.”
This could potentially be a useful feature for a variety of users from businesses looking to keep an eye on their respective niches’ SERPs, to people just interested in getting information on any given keyword topic delivered straight to their feed readers.
“Screen-scraping Google results was already easily possible but once live, RSS feeds should be a nice addition nevertheless, especially for all the tools out there which only work on RSS,” says Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped.
Quite frankly, it seems a little odd to me that this isn’t already an option, and I’ve wondered in the past why it wasn’t. McGee even points out that Google is the only major search engine not to offer such a feature. That is odd in itself, since Google is so often the trendsetter, particularly when it comes to anything search related, not to mention the company’s vested interest in RSS feeds with it’s ownership of Feedburner.
Anyhow, the launch of this feature will be something to keep an eye out for. Of course in the meantime, you can always subscribe to Yahoo! or Microsoft searches.
