Google Blog Search Falls Short With RSS and Updates
I turned to Google Blog Search this morning to look more deeply at their new and improved service. But after some review, it appears to me that Techmeme will continue to be the better fit for the news junkie in me.
Google Blog Search shows glimpses of how much Google has improved this service and what lengths the company has come with its UI. It’s reminiscent of the work you see from Jeffrey Veen, who recently left Google Analytics. Clean and simple with a chart that illustrates the trend. Google Blog Search is an easy to use, organized view of what is bubbling in the blogosphere across 12 categories.
But, wait. Something is missing. Where’s the RSS feed for the category I am searching? RSS shows in the search for a topic but no feed exists for the category. I had breakfast with Marshall Kirkpatrick this morning and he suggested scraping the page for the feed.
I tried using Dapper to pull out a feed from the page but Google Blog Search uses javascript to serve up content. Nothing appears in the Dapper virtual browser or alternatively you get an error message. Dapper just doesn’t see it. Marshall tweeted about it. A few folks like Adam DuVander suggested “some server side foo,” but that’s not the point. A hack would be fun to do but the issue is the missing feed. Funny, though, It looks like the updates to Google Blog Search happen several hours apart, perhaps defeating the need for any kind of feed at all in the category search.
I thought about taking the blog categories and doing searches on keywords related to the top stories to then use in AideRSS. That would make sense for long running stories or those you want to track but overall it is wy too much work. All I want is a feed for the categories.
Compare Google Blog Search to Techmeme. You can subscribe to the Techmeme main feed, the raw feed or to any number of RSS readers or personal news pages. The feed updates every five minutes. That’s a fire hose.
That’s a lot of feeds coming in through your reader. And it’s not for everyone. Gabe Rivera, Techmeme’s founder says sending feeds out every five minutes is really for the news junkie or the Twitter user who want a more immediate view of events around them.
Going beyond 30 headlines would overwhelm most subscribers. This selectivity has a downside: headlines don’t appear in the RSS feed until they’ve amassed enough “importance”, so the feed seems “slow”. Another, more obvious downside: certain news junkies want to see every last headline that appears.
I have friends who want that kind of fire hose. It’s far easier to manage than you could ever do before. For example, services like Snackr allow you to have an RSS Ticker right on your desktop, independent of the browser. It’s an Adobe Air application, one of several I now use to keep posted on people and topics I find of interest.
I will continue to use Google Blog Search for research but Techmeme is still the service that gives me the news fix I need, in a feed, right across the bottom of my desktop.
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