RSS feeds for search results

I did a web search for ‘RSS feeds for search results’ and found a Live Search blog entry dating from 1995 that talks about the alpha feature of providing RSS feeds from search results: just add ‘&format=rss’ to the URL of the results and copy the full URL into your RSS Reader.

This still works on the main Live search site and is made easier by just clicking on the orange RSS icon in the URL. Here’s the ‘RSSed’ URL for Flooding information from the UK government: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=flooding+site%3agov.uk&format=rss

Very nifty, but interestingly, Live don’t seem to draw users’ attention to it or even provide information in Help.

Yahoo! offers the similar features to Live, with different syntax, but the RSS icon.

In contrast, Google only offers RSS feeds (RSS and Atom) for its news results but does publicise it clearly. Similarly, the BBC offers RSS of its news and sports results.

Other web search engines such as Ask, Exalead and Clusty do not appear to offer RSS at all.