From a Search Engine
The current popular search engines have many great features, but they don’t usually provide any form of feed for search results. Such a feed is extremely useful for people trying to keep track of specific search topics (for example, their name).
I personally host a Google-to-RSS service, which you are free to use. It’s at http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/google_to_rss.html. To use it, simply add your search request to the end of the URL http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=. For example:
http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=ben%20hammersley
Now, subscribe to that URL in your newsreader.
Note that I’m running this service from my own
Google API key, which has a limit of 1,000 queries a day. If
you’d like to help out, you can get your own key
from http://www.google.com/apis/
and use it with your own queries. Add it to the URL with a
&k=123456789 attribute, like this:
http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=ben%20hammersley&k=123456789
The source code for this service is discussed in Chapter 10.
Google News
Google News searches can also be turned into feeds via a service hosted by Julian Bond, found at http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php.
That page has a form to help generate the feed’s URL, or you can make it up yourself with this pattern:
http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?num=number_of_items&q=your_query
Note that this Google News service is for personal aggregators only and not for redisplay on another web site. The ...