Monitor the News with RSS

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 across web sites (including services such as My Yahoo!). Web sites and programs that consume RSS are called newsreaders, and using one can dramatically increase the amount of information you can consume in a much shorter period of time. Instead of visiting a series of news sites looking for new information on topics you're interested in, you can simply subscribe to a news feed for the topic and any new information automatically appears in your newsreader.

Yahoo! has made it painfully easy to track information from Yahoo! News in My Yahoo!. If you do a Yahoo! News search at http://news.search.yahoo.com, you'll see an "Add to My Yahoo! / RSS" header to the right of the results, as shown in Figure.

"Add to My Yahoo! / RSS" box on News search results

This box gives you all of the information you need to start tracking a phrase in your own newsreader. If you use My Yahoo!, you can simply click the button with the blue plus sign and you'll be reading the latest stories about your favorite topic on a regular basis (see Figure).

Yahoo News! search results in My Yahoo!

If you use a different newsreader, you'll need to follow some quick steps. First, right-click the white-on-orange XML icon (or Ctrl-click it on a Mac) and choose Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut, depending on your browser. This will put the feed URL for the current search results onto your virtual clipboard. Then, open your newsreader and find the dialog for adding a subscription. Copy the feed URL, and you should find a new subscription for your search, such as the one highlighted in Figure.

Now, if any news articles that flow through one of the 7,000 sources at Yahoo News! contain the term cartography, you'll know about it as you browse your other news sources. Of course, this works just as well with other queries, and if mapping isn't your area, you can customize the feeds to track your own interests.