Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results

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Would you like to monitor Google search results for a particular query in your favorite RSS News Reader? You have two options depending on what you would like to monitor.

Option A: RSS Feed for Fresh Results

If you are ego-surfing and would like to know as new web pages get added to Google Search around a particular query, a good bet is the feed option in Google Alerts.

Type your query in the search box, choose “Everything” for type, choose “All Results” for Volume and set “Feed” as the Delivery Method. Google will create an RSS feed of web search results that you can subscribe to in Google Reader or any other RSS Reader.

You may refer to the Google Alerts tutorial to write more advanced search queries.

Option B: RSS Feed for All Google Search Results

A limitation with feeds created using “Google Alerts” is that the feed won’t include all results. In fact, the first time you create a feed, it is likely to be empty and results would be added as Google discovers and indexes new content for that search query.

If you would like to have an RSS Feed for all search results that appear on the front page on Google, irrespective of the time when those page were added to Google, use the following method:

Go to code.google.com/apis/console and sign-in using your existing Google Account. Click the “API Access” link in the left sidebar and the copy your unique Google API key to the clipboard.

#3: Now replace the API_KEY and QUERY in the following URL with your own values and your RSS feed for Google Search is ready for use. If you query contains multiple words, you may simple use the + symbol (as in london+riots+2011).

https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?alt=atom&cx=010722013183089041389:ab5yj_rbe5q&key=API_Key&q=Query

The above URL points to regular feed that you can subscribe to in any news reader. Also, these are regular Google search queries so you may also use advanced search operators like site:, inurl or even the undocumented Around operator.

The only limitation is that you can call this URL more than 100 times in a day. However, if you enable billing inside the Google API Console, the free limit will be upgraded to 200 search queries per day.

An easier alternative for creating RSS feeds would have been to use screen scraping in combination with Yahoo! Pipes or Google Docs but unfortunately, Google search servers seem to deny screen scraping requests.