Why RSS Feeds For Search Engine Results Are Useless
January 14th, 2005Microsoft is supporting RSS in their beta search. I’m not the least bit excited about this. Here’s why:
The top ten results for a general search engine (like G or Y!) rarely change for general keywords. (Who uses more than 2 keywords anyway, right?) I monitor numerous queries in over 16 engines for my consulting work and there are rarely any new results that appear in the top 10. The point of RSS is to get updated with anything new to appear on a page (and more importantly, customized feeds crated by the user). Since the information in search engines rarely changes (an remember, you are NOT searching the live web), why bother supporting RSS? This makes no sense. Can someone please explain why I would want to add this to my aggregator? As an aside, Yahoo does NOT support RSS for their general search results. Smart.
I’ll tell you what I am happy about. You can now get news results via RSS from MSN. Smart. The news changes constantly. A sample customizes RSS feed for MSN for the keywords ‘Tsunami Relief’ is http://beta.search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?q=tsunami+relief&format=rss. Just change the keywords after ‘q=’ and you have your own customized feed.