Bing - RSS Feeds for Search Results - Search Blog

January 11, 2005, 08:20 PM by Bing | 92 Comments

We’ve been experimenting with RSS Search results on our live servers and we’ve been found out by Greg Linden, Gary Price & many others. Good job guys! :-)

This is an experimental alpha feature that is still under development. Since this is an experiment, be aware that we will be changing it and making it better. We are planning to keep the feeds up during the experiment, but will not if they are abused. Use them from your RSS readers, but please don't recreate our search engine with them. But don’t get me wrong – this is a service we want to provide and make great. Tell us how we can make it better. What should we add? An orange button? What should we subtract? We’ve created a wiki page, and we’ll be watching your blogs and comments for your suggestions.

I’m sure most of already know how to find this feature, but just in case here are some step-by-step instructions:
- run your web or news search on the MSN Search Beta
- add the text ‘&format=rss’ to the url
- copy the full url into your RSS Reader.

Here is a sample web search url:
http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=tsunami+relief&format=rss

Here is a sample news search url:
http://beta.search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?q=tsunami+relief&format=rss

-- Brady Forrest, PM

Comments

Mr Blobby

Posted On January 11, 2005, 08:40 PM

Have you considered having a seperate feed for each 'context' of a word? One for Jaguar the car, one for jaguar the cat?

How about returning a feed containing just images/news/video/whatever?

sean

Posted On January 11, 2005, 08:51 PM

This would be perfect for news, if the news search had "search sliders" like the ones available on web search, or even simple sorting options.

/pd

Posted On January 11, 2005, 09:41 PM

Wow.. this is mind blowing.. !! I really don't know how to comment.. !!

I did notice Greg et al chatters with MSN search&RSS..but it just hit me between the eyes when I did it (sic) with RSS embedded on the 'long trail' !! :)-

its great, but I am seeing old results.. so the crawl on my trackback / links etc ar outdated.. is this because of deep alpha stage ??

Anthony Alvarado

Posted On January 11, 2005, 11:08 PM

excellent feature!
i wiil use in my news site!

Nathan Weinberg

Posted On January 11, 2005, 11:56 PM

God, you guys are so good at being open about this stuff. Kudos!

Ian

Posted On January 12, 2005, 04:37 AM

You should also support the RSS feed auto discovery mechanism used in Firefox, like it is used on this blog (i.e. using a < link > tag.

Also on this blog, you could do with adding a title attribute to the link tag for the RSS feed - so instead of it reading 'Subscribe to RSS' it would read 'Subscribe to msnsearch's WebLog', or on a search, 'Subscribe to this search result' or similar.

Ian

Ian

Posted On January 12, 2005, 04:41 AM

I've found more details about how to do this at the address above (not anything to do with me).

feuman

Posted On January 12, 2005, 05:18 AM

is the amount of results configurable? if yes, how?

gani

Posted On January 12, 2005, 06:26 AM

really nice!

.Net Adventures

Posted On January 12, 2005, 06:27 AM

Cool!
I will use MSN Search Feed in my blog.

Don Park

Posted On January 12, 2005, 06:38 AM

Hehe. Good job. It took a while but I am happy to see it finally surface.

Vic Berggren

Posted On January 12, 2005, 08:39 AM

I'm already adding feeds... I noticed that I can only get 10 results in the feed though. Is there a parameter that I can pass into my feed string so that I can expand the results to a default of 50 vs. 10?

Francis Shanahan

Posted On January 12, 2005, 09:50 AM

Cool. I've been waiting for RSS to get a bit broader in terms of functionality (read: take over the world). This is a step in that direction ;)

Feature suggestion: How about a flag indicating if you want to search RSS content or general Web Pages themselves. That way you could limit the search to return RSS feeds only and then implement an "I'm feeling lucky" flag that automatically goes to the first feed mentioned in the results.
Thoughts?

theglobalchinese

Posted On January 12, 2005, 10:22 AM

Excellent offering with certainly a bright future and connected to <a href="http://www.highbeam.com/library/index.asp?">HighBeam Library</a> or other features, it would add even stronger dynamic feeds.

paulhiles

Posted On January 12, 2005, 12:37 PM

Great way to monitor search results for a site's keywords. What are the legal implications of simply displaying the results? The initial title/header states the source of the data, so I'm presuming there's no copyright infringement there, if not, could someone please let me know.

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