Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Submit Your RSS Feed To Google Now

Last night Google switched on what may be a feature marking an historical evolutionary point in the evolution of the most popular Internet search engine.

Within the Google Personalized Home Page facility, Google has in fact activated a full RSS aggregator, capable of bringing together on your private Google Home page any and all the feeds that you want to subscribe to.

Google_RSS_personalized_home_page_350_20050727.gif

It goes with it that for Google to make this possible, it is also capturing, indexing and tracking any and each of those RSS feeds, though what the most popular search engine is exactly going to do with that feed data is not yet visible to the public.

So in one shot Google opens up officially to full RSS adoption and use, launches an online RSS aggregator that is easy and functional to use and opens up the door for RSS feed submissions directly to its indexes.

 

 

The new Google Personalized Home page allows indeed easy addition of RSS feed URLs, though the interface isn't as sleek and functional as the one from Microsoft Start, which I like so far the best.

With this move Google equalizes somehow the advantage that Yahoo and Microsoft had taken over it with earlier introductions of their Web-based RSS aggregators and officially steps into the RSS-fray for indexing and leveraging at some point or another the full cloud of RSS content that it will be collecting.

And for those of you interested in increasing the reach and visibility of your RSS feeds, you now have a fast, easy and direct way to submit your those feeds to Google itself.

While it is hard to say now how and when Google will start leveraging that RSS-based content to augment, expand and diversify its search capabilities, it is almost certain that at it will.

So, to make your blog and RSS feed part of this new Google index, head off to the Google Personalized Home page facility and follow this simple instructions:

a) If you don't have a Google Account click here and create one now. (If you do just go to http://www.google.com/ig and log in)

b) Sign in on the Google Personalized Home Page.

Google_personalized_home_page_left_col.gif

c) Look at the left column and click on "Create a section".

d) Input your RSS or Atom feed directly.

That's all!



For now, the Google Personalized Home page displays only a the feed title (cut off to the first three words) and the titles (only) of the latest posts appearing in it.

Please test it out yourself, and let me have your feedback and insight.



N.B.: While testing further the new Google Personalized Home Page features, I also noticed that, nonetheless I do have a GMail account, I wasn't able to make Google display a feed of the latest emails show up on this page. While I could have input the RSS feed that is generated by GMail accounts by default, I wanted to see whether there was any way to specify which GMail account I wanted to monitor. But, as it seems, I'll have to wait for this.

Gmail_preview_on_Personalized_home_page.gif

For now Google only allows me to specify how many email messages I want to preview here, but gives me no option to specify my Gmail account.

 
 
Readers' Comments    
2010-03-22 22:44:58

silvia smith

great stuff for my website.



2010-01-14 15:48:23

Andy

Hi, It would be good to get an update on whether adding an rss feed to igoogle really does ensure you content is indexed...

Also, what are experiences in comparison with Google webmasters tools where you can submit your feed?

Thanks for interesting article..



2007-11-02 11:52:18

Robin Good

Raoul, I think the best would be to do both!

Actually with good titles/page titles individual press releases may perform better as individual pages on search engines, but then again an RSS feed that contains all of them is nowdays a must.

You will then need to go and submit your RSS feed to some of the major RSS search engines and directories. To do that check my RSSTop55 at:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rsstop55



2007-11-02 11:42:29

Raoul

I want to create an RSS feed for my website but I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do? or should just add all my news releases to one page.



2006-08-31 20:24:13

EMAS Los Angeles Acting School

Thanks for the info. I had been meaning to add a rss feed for our Los Angeles Acting School and this did the trick. Nice!



2006-08-17 15:08:25

Claude Bourgoin

RSS is here to stay. I think as more end more people realize the power of rss it will go from the shadows to the mainstream. Google has certainly understood that!



2006-05-27 18:11:57

Frank Herget

Pretty nice description.



2005-12-14 20:23:00

Adrian Lee

Very good article, makes it so much easier to understand google rss.



2005-11-01 08:50:20

sadi

thanks for the article. It really helped me alot. Now I can also see my rss news on my personalized google. Looks cool. But think yahoo one is far more advanced with lot more features. But its good to see google also catching up..:)



2005-09-01 23:12:01

Matthew Keith

My.Yahoo is the undisputed King of current rss aggregators, but it's good to hear that Google is making an aggregator of their own. I'm sure that a billion dollar company like them can make it pretty comparable to Yahoo's aggregator in no time. My question is, will this help to get blogs/websites listed faster in Google? Hmmmm.



2005-08-26 09:46:46

merlinvicki

Google has always been very futuristic in their approach to embracing cutting-edge technology. Lets wait and watch...



2005-08-15 07:51:43

classictermpapers

Its a great news , hope google rss reader is same like yahoo rss reader .



2005-08-12 12:20:48

cosmetictimes

We have added this feature on our website. Hope google could find them.



2005-08-08 01:01:33

wan1980

great news



2005-07-31 19:27:04

I found Yahoo 'My Yahoo' page is much more sophisticated and feature rich than Google. It is still a long way to go for Google to match what Yahoo currently offers. My yahoo not only allows to aggregate news and rss feeds, it allows to get everything on your own page from your mails, calendar,groups, premium content. More over you can create more than as many custom pages you want. For example I have a page which aggregates news based on my filters, while another page has ll rss feeds aggregation.



2005-07-27 17:46:47

Ellen Finkelstein

I'm also happy that Google has started an RSS reader, but it's still very understated and has some bugs, as I've noted in my post at http://ellenfinkelstein.com/cgi/wp/?p=53. Try finding a feed by entering a topic in the text box. (You can see a screen shot on my post.) They also avoid calling it "RSS," as I also discuss. Nevertheless, this is part of Google's continuing plan to collect great Web resources and then make them available via search. I made it my home page.



 
posted by Robin Good on Wednesday, July 27 2005, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015

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