RSS Feeds for Google News
I don't currently use Google News to follow the search industry. For one thing, Google news doesn't index and update all the blogs I read every day. I may give it a shot, just to spread my search industry coverage a little wider, but the last thing I need is another feed full of 75 new posts every day and half of them are the same Reuters story on 30 different news sites.

Ok ok, before I get TOO grumbly about it I guess I should try it out.

But... is Google RSS feeds actually news?

Well, kind of. For one thing, the news section has been the sort of brilliant though neglected child. Google keeps it ad free, and I know from experience that a story on the Google news index gets MAD TRAFFIC. So the fact that Google's making some notable advances could indicate a coming ad product here.

It could be an RSS ad product too, depending on the adoption rate.

Still, to me it makes more sense to add contextual ads to the existing categories, as that's where the traffic is and it's something like 2% of web users who use RSS.

The other way I think this is a fairly large deal is that Google's competitors have all been offering RSS news feeds for awhile. Google's entrance further indicates the growing demand for RSS.

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Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |