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Google Blocks RSS News Feeds
WebProNews
Staff Writer
2004-04-02
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Google has filed a cease and desist order to stop RSS news feeds from using Google News as a source for headlines. The motion was filed against a programmer from Britain, named Julian Bond, who created the php script that crawls Google News.
Bond's news feed was created for his website, Ecademy.com site. His script allows users to keyword-search Google News and turn the results into an RSS feed.
While Google has allowed API (application program interface) powered searches to be used on other sites, the company has not moved into the area of news syndication, as of yet. Google's API communicates through SOAP, an XML-based messaging protocol, which allows users to query over 2 billion documents. The API is limited to Google Search but does not search Google News.
The speculation as to why Google blocks RSS feeds from Google News is that Google is supporting another subscription service, Atom. Bond, on the other hand thinks Google is lagging behind in the news subscription service.
Speaking to InternetNews.com, Bond quoted an email that Google sent to him when they filed the order, "(Google) doesn't currently offer an RSS or other feed, but as you may know, Google News is still in beta. We're considering a number of improvements based on feedback from our users. Given that we're still fine-tuning this service, it's too early for us to know which of the many great ideas we've received will be implemented."
While Bond removed the RSS feed from his site, the programmer released the script to the open source world. "The script is still up there and I'm sure people are still using it", Bond said. "I'm not sure how they would even know that you are scraping Google News and sending headlines to your aggregator."
Bond now uses Yahoo's subscription service in his news aggregator.
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