Library clips

Using Yahoo! News to try and create a site RSS feed (as some news sites don’t have their own RSS feeds)…and if possible also create an RSS feed for a search term within one site.

Also note, if you want to create an RSS feed for a section, eg. business, within a news site use the category section in the Advanced Search, also try limiting your search using Source and Location (these limits make your RSS feed more precise)

Sometimes a section of a news site isn’t available as a category so you can’t use this in the advanced search…it would be good if you could do a search like
eg. inurl:finance.news.com.au/markets…it only works if you take out the end bit “/markets”.

On the contrary sometimes a news site hasn’t got, eg. a business section, but if you select that as a category in advanced search it works.

Search Queries

• site:theadvertiser.news.com.au
  SEARCH WORKS
  NO RSS feed (where is it!)
• Westpac site:theadvertiser.news.com.au
  SEARCH WORKS
  RSS feed (broken)
  When I read it in Bloglines the RSS feed returns results for all Yahoo news not just within the site theadvertiser.news.com.au
• inurl:theadvertiser.news.com.au
  SEARCH WORKS
  RSS feed (broken)
  When I read it in Bloglines the RSS feed returns results for all Yahoo! News that have the term “in”
• Westpac inurl:theadvertiser.news.com.au
  SEARCH DOESN’T WORK

Library Stuff has mentioned this before.

FURTHER ANALYSIS

Yahoo! News doesn’t enable to search at the category level

eg.Yahoo! News > Business…or even further Yahoo! News > Business > Industries

same goes with Google News

More Yahoo! News

Yahoo! Australia & NZ News > Business
NO RSS FEEDS
NO SEARCH WITHIN THIS CATEGORY

A way around searching Australian content is using the main Yahoo! News page and putting Australia in the search term, or more precise is using Advanced Search and typing Australia in the Location field.

Yahoo! Finance
NO RSS FEEDS
NO SEARCH WITHIN THIS CATEGORY

Yahoo! Australia & NZ Finance - News
RSS FEEDS - Top Stories, and also a list of RSS feeds from the News Sources
It lacks a search query RSS feed which would be great.

Packaged News

Also noticed that they have various versions of packaged news.

If you are in, Yahoo! News > Business > Industries and you scroll down you will notice there is a section called “Business in Yahoo! News From.”
If you click on on a link like Automotive, you will be taked to a topic package of news.
(Again you can’t search within this topic and their is no RSS feed available)

Going back a page or even on the page you are on, you will see another topic package of news called Full Coverage, this is also available on a tab at the top (as long as you are on the homepage).

Here are the choices, if you click on a topic heading you can see the full list.
Here is one for Alternative Energy, here is another on Oil & Gas.

This is a great snap shot, this type of well organied packaged coverage makes me what to read news from this one spot, without needing to go anywhere else.
(Pity you can’t search within this topic and their is no RSS feed available to read this in a RSS reader)

Now I also noticed another topic package called Industry Center.

There are many choices that cover Oil, and Gas, but they cover different news angles than the Full News Coverage section.

Check out the section Metal Mining if you click on the latest news you go to just a news page on Metal Mining, see here.

Again you can’t search within this section (there isn’t even a search box) and their isn’t an RSS feed which would be handy.

I looked in the Yahoo! News RSS feed directory and they don’t have a specific RSS feed that covers Metal Mining.

Well you could say just make an RSS feed from a free-text search query in the Yahoo! News homepage.
Indeed generating a feed for Metal Mining brings up different content, I guess it isn’t as succinct, as it returns results where the phrase “Metal Mining” appears, the news article won’t neccessarily be about “Metal Mining”. (I wonder how the Industry Center version chooses it’s content, maybe it processes results that have subject metadata, who knows…)

To go an even further level you can search Company News within Metal Mining, check out the index.

Clicking on Alcoa will show their profile, then click on “more headlines…” and you will see just Alcoa News
This is exactly what I want but their is no RSS feed, aargh!

…and if I do a search in Yahoo! News for Alcoa the results won’t be as succinct.

Even more specific news headlines are available at the stock level.

Continuing the example, if you scroll down there is a search box and a link to look up symbols for stocks. If I go to the symbols look up page and type Alcoa in world markets I get this result.

I’m interested in AAI.AX, then click on “more headlines for AAI.AX…” and I get this very precise news page…an RSS feed at this precise level would be great as I’m certain the content is extremely relevant, no need to filter results.

Although Yahoo! provide many already made packages of news, it lacks the usability of the needs of a researcher, at least allowing fielded search at any category level and generating RSS search feeds at every instance…this is something I hope Yahoo! News endeavours to develop as I think they have done a fine job so far!

ADDED 13/05/05: You can subscibe to an RSS feed for company news, see here.