I was browsing the class blogosphere this morning and noticed that Scott had blogged about google news. This reminded me of an interesting article I had read about google news and their attempts to block RSS scraping. Obviously, the next step for google news was to provide an RSS feed, thus making it the most complete source for all news on the internet. However, not only did google not pursue this avenue, but they actually went so far as to stop people that were trying to make their own google news feeds using third party scripts. The article explains:
Google issued a cease-and-desist order against British programmer Julian Bond with a warning that the creation of a news feed from the results of Google News was against its terms of reference.
According to Bond, the company requested the removal of RSS-powered Google News headlines from his Ecademy business networking site and made it clear Webmasters are not allowed to display headlines from Google News on third-party sites.
and the author provides this gem of a quote:
"I find it a little strange that Google was among the first companies to use a SOAP API but they've done nothing to extend it beyond Web search. Contrast that with Yahoo, which has introduced their own RSS aggregator and provides feeds from all sections of the search. I think Google is missing a trick here," Bond said.
For the time being, not only will google continue to fail to provide users with RSS feeds, but they will also discourage people from attempting to make their own with google's sources. This whole concept is against the entire vision of google, which has been known to allow third parties unmetered access to google search APIs for development of new software. Untill google realizes that they are missing the evolution of RSS and website syndication, users will turn toward sites that are already supporting RSS including Yahoo! news.
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