Most of us have a few (or many!) topics that we do repeat searches on in the big search engines. This might be a research topic you’re trying to keep up to date on, your library’s name or even your own name. An RSS feed for a subject search can save you some time by automatically send you recent changes in the top hits for your favorite search. (Reminds me of setting up SDI searches in Dialog many moons ago!) But none of the major search engines make it easy to set up an RSS feed for a general search.
So thanks to Digital Inspiration for this tip on how to create an RSS feed for a subject search in Windows Live. Just use this feed format and put your search words after the “q=”:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=your+search+keywords&format=rss
Yahoo has had a similary obscure hack to create a feed. The link used to appear in the html code for a Yahoo search page. I don’t see it there anymore, but the format is still working. Again, just put your search words after the “query=”:
http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=your+search+keywords
And the free trial version of the Google Alert (not part of Google) lets you set up feeds for up to 3 searches.
What other services or tricks do you use to monitor search results?
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Sept. 2 Update:
- The Yahoo hack shown above works for Video, Images and News as well. See Digital Inspiration for the details.
- Google’s own “Google Alerts” provides email updates for Web searches. Google blog and news searches have RSS feeds.
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. 🙂 Cheers! Sandra. R.