Google News Turns On RSS Feeds

Google News has introduced RSS feeds as a way for users to receive headlines shown on its pages through a feed reader, or for headlines to be integrated into e-mail and Web applications.

Google is offering three types of feeds: one feed that will aggregate all the headlines in a section, a feed based on search terms, and a feed that is based on customization the user may have made to a Google News page.

The feeds will be offered in the Atom 0.3 and RSS 2.0 standards.

"For some time now, the Google News team has noticed a steady uptick in feature requests for feed support," Vijay Boyapati, Software Engineer at Google wrote in the company blog Tuesday.

Google News, which gathers headlines from 4,500 English sources according to the company, aggregates stories by subject matter and topic. The headlines are updated every 15 minutes.

Stories are selected by a computer algorithm rather than by humans. Google says this is a good thing: "news sources are selected without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, enabling you to see how different news organizations are reporting the same story."

In addition to the United States, Google provides 21 other localized versions of its news service across the world. However, the feed option is only being provided in six locales: Austraila, Canada, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. All six countries have versions of the site in English.