Yahoo! Hacks

Monitor the News with RSS

Keep your finger on the pulse of your favorite news topics by adding Yahoo! News search results to your favorite RSS reader.

Trying to stay on top of all of the news on a specific topic can feel like a losing battle. Say you spend your time working with maps, so you’re interested in cartography. Imagine you’re interested in every aspect of cartography and want to keep up with any new mentions of the word cartography in the news. You’d like to hear about everything from new mapping applications for the Web to new geographic discoveries. This could take a lot of time and effort, subscriptions to all of the major newspapers, and the time to read every article looking for mentions of cartography. Of course, Yahoo! News pulls this information together into one web site and makes it searchable, but even that can be tedious to check on a regular basis.

Starting at Yahoo! News, you could type the word into the form and get back some stories from the past few days. You could visit the site every day to check for new stories, but keeping track of the changes between queries each day would be a tedious task by hand. You’d have to compare the current list of stories with yesterday’s list, and see what sites show up in the results that weren’t there the day before. Luckily, there’s an easier, automated way to monitor search results with RSS.

Yahoo! offers RSS output of many of its features, including search results. The simple RSS format can be used to syndicate information ...