google blog search finally has atom & rss feeds

google blog search new feature atom rss feeds, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Not surprisingly, this was the most requested feature for Google Blog Search, atom and RSS feeds (just like Google News has, for example). The lack of such functionality until today meant, in my case, not EVER using the service directly (if some of its juice got into Google search, fine). But now I am giddy with options, and cannot wait to pile my new feeds high. Why? That's why. While their results are not perfect, they're better than defunct Technorati and such services, they're free, and they're delivered to my feed reader (Google Reader, how funny!) whenever they are indexed rather than whenever I remember to run a search. They're also a much better experience as a feed than, say, Google Alerts (of which I'll remove most), avoiding repetition hopefully, though you can still get blog search results by email, as an alternative. Ultimately, they're good because they exist, because they're possible. Don't take feeds for granted. I did, and now I'm sorry: Twitter search has had feeds ever since it was called summize (loved that name & logo), but I've subscribed to very few as Twitter also had more or less ALL the history of a search, pages and pages of results going back in time. Which then got shortened to some 30 days or so. And recently even more, to about 12 days or so. Meaning that soon you won't be able to access anything old from Twitter, unless you had been subscribed to a feed (I'm now subscribed to all Twitter feeds of interest, you bet). Interesting, no? Almost seeing a revenue stream there, IN ALL THAT DATA, if not a business model, but that's a different story. Subscribe to the feeds of your top keywords in Google Blog Search and Google News. History is a good thing.