If you hadn't taken seriously my previous post about Google finally moving to fully adopt and support RSS, now you have final proof that the most popular search engine has indeed understood the limitations of supporting Atom feeds only and has finally made available its all of its Web and News content as full RSS feeds.

Now, you can extract an RSS feed from any Google News category, specific search and even from your own custom Personalized Google News Page.

All Google News content now accessible via Google feeds is made available in both Atom and RSS formats. After doing any type of search you can directly use the Atom or RSS link that are made accessible on the left-hand side of your search results page.

Google support for RSS has only been added to Google News content and not to its standard web content searches.

Re-use of Google RSS feed content is officially limited to non-commercial uses (how about next to some Google AdWords ads - is that prohibited too?) and requires full crediting of individual sources included, Google itself (include a link to the Google News cluster of related articles for each news item, using the link provided in the Google News feed), and the publication of the search terms and criteria used to create the feed (isn't that again a bit too conservative too, since combination of unique search queries and other newsmastering formulas may very weak be worth quite a lot to those who develop them).

Also according to the publicly accessible terms Google RSS Feeds are not re-distributable to others.

More information about Google RSS feeds, access to them and the specific use terms associated to it can be found here:
http://news.google.com/intl/...

My question is: once you put an ocean of RSS sources and search queries into an RSS-enabled database engine, and then you extract only those that match your criteria and remix and publish them in a new format and layout, how can you track back where each news item is coming from?

Wouldn't it be better if I could actually use and remix all of these content items, while crediting all original sources and RSS sources/generators, without being restricted to a personal use?

Who is benefiting the most from enforcing this limitation?

If you had RSS content that you wouldn't want to be re-distributed or accessed by a growing number of readers why just not place it under secure password protected access, instead of offering its public free access with an imposition to leverage it only for personal use.

Are we really sure that this offers the most benefit to all parties involved, including Google?

I do have many strong doubts about this, but if you like to prove me wrong you are really welcome to do so, more in the spirit of helping me see things I may have overlooked than for the sake of having a discussion of who is right and who is wrong.

I am definitely open to learn on this front, as my curiosity to understand how can such a restrictive model hold itself up against its own very potential (when permission would be given to openly re-use such feeds) escapes my hardest attempts to make sense of it.

What do you see?