Attention SearcheRSS
In “Attention ShopeRSS” we saw MSN Shopping add the ability to get your shopping search results as an RSS feed. This lets you monitor the marketplace for new goods that you are interested in without the need to continually re-visit their search portal.
A scant month later we find that MSN Search has added the same functionality. Any search results can be returned as RSS 2.0, using this REST url format:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?&format=rss&q=YourSearch
As with MSN Shopping, only RSS 2.0 is currently available as an output format. MSN has also added a stylesheet to the feed which allows for friendly viewing of the feed directly in a web browser, thanks to XSLT. (Here’s a raw feed example to view.)
Syndicated feed search results are a fabulous tool for researchers, analysts, or even copyright lawyers who can now monitor certain keyword searches automatically in their aggregator. Want to know when new people are talking about your product, website, or wife? Let your feed reader do the work.
So the big question is… how long until Google and Yahoo follow suit?
September 2nd, 2005 at 08:49
Hi Mark,
it’s been there for a while:
http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/11/351064.aspx
So probably they took it out of beta now and announced it publicly?
BTW, I ‘ve been experimenting with it myself for a while and I found it not be far less useful for discovering NEW links and resources than Google alerts, even if you set “Updated recently” to 100% : http://search.msn.com/docs/help.aspx?t=SEARCH_REF_AdvSrchOperators.htm&FORM=HERE#sb_rr
What you get is that e.g. Bloglines reports a search result whenever it has changed its description. And new results only are mentioned when they reach the top ten, which of course only a few pages do.