I came accross this post on Research Buzz that illustrates very well that I am not the only one who suffered from pleasure overload when the Google News RSS feed feature was launched:
My husband walked in as I was in the kitchen making lunch (hummus on rye and iced tea.) As I moved around the room I did a Jules Feifferesque dance. Slow with a lot of sway-ey bendy stuff.
He watched me for a moment. “Are you all right?”
I tossed the hummus back in the fridge and pirouetted (slowly). “This is my happy dance with lunch creation. It’s a celebration of the fact that we haven’t run out of hummus and the bread isn’t moldy yet. Oh, and that Google News is now offering RSS feeds.”
I don’t think I did a happy dance, but I am certainly loving having these feeds in my RSS aggregators. I’ve got the standard Top News, Business and Sci/Tech feeds as well as a few based on my own search terms to capture the goings on in the telecommunications industry and get the latest news about what is going on in China.
I think it’s the ability to track your own Google News searches which is the real power of this feature. After you conduct your search in Google News, look to the left-hand side of the results page, under the gray boxes which contain the links to the standard Google News pages. You’ll find a link for RSS and Atom feeds. Right-click and copy-paste or whatever it is you do to add an RSS or Atom URL to your aggregator, and you’re good to go. Ci researchers can enter company names and key terms of interest to their industry and they’re well on their way to having a firehose blast of news delivered to their desktop.
