August 3, 2009

Turn Bing Searches into RSS Feeds

Are you doing research on a topic, and want to save your results and be made aware when new information about that topic is published on the web? Bing, Microsoft's new "decision" engine, allows you to convert any search into an RSS feed. Just add the feed to your favorite feed reader (such as Google Reader) and the top 10 results from the search will be added to your feed reader.

To create an RSS feed in Bing, conduct a search, and at the end of the URL from the search results screen add the following text: &format=rss. For example, here is the URL for a Bing search of Lance Armstrong: http://www.bing.com/search?q=lance+armstrong&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n. Here is the URL to turn the search into an RSS feed: http://www.bing.com/search?q=lance+armstrong&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n&format=RSS.

Please note that RSS feeds can only be created for website searches, not for video or image searches.


2 comments:

Columbus said...

Thanks for sharing how to do this! Is there something similar for Google search results?

Unknown said...

Thanks for the comment Columbus, in order to do the same thing with Google, I would direct you to this posting on ReadWriteWeb.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_use_the_new_google_web_feeds.php

The instructions are very clear, and will show you how to set up an RSS subscription for Google Searches.