UPDATE: This is no longer true. Google now finally does RSS for their News service.

Hard to believe that there could be search services that are done better than Google, but there are. I've been getting involved with some projects that are looking at monitoring very specific topics from the web, e.g. doing reputation management. Monitoring blogs is fairly easy using PubSub, Feedster and DayPop, but the rest of the Web, e.g. news sites and other non-RSSified web sites haven't been as easy to monitor with RSS. What we're looking for is a method for monitoring topics in more than just blogs and news sources (which IBM's WebFountain was supposed to help with, but failed to work with Factiva). We're also looking for the occurrences of a topic in the darker Web. The biggest problem, however, when you have someone considering looking for so much is to find a way to make the results relevant and manageable.

MSN's Search Beta provides one solution that works at providing Web search results as RSS. Execute any search and append "&format=rss" to the url and you have an RSS feed. This is described more in greater detail on the msnsearch blog.

Yahoo! News offers the best solution for News to RSS. Execute any search and look for the orange XML button in the right navigation bar.

But Google hasn't done this for their Search and News services. The reason could be that they would be giving away their service without forcing people to use the service on Google and see their advertising. But this lack of a complete service offering that includes RSS makes it difficult for people to use off the shelf software do such things as monitor topics in an exhaustive manner. Some people do have the need to monitor topics exhaustively in many different domains, e.g. blogs, web sites, news sites, news groups.

I love the Google brand, but I wish they could get their heads around a way to offer us their services via RSS. At the very least, I'd like to see Google News offer this service publicly as Yahoo! News does so I don't have to go through Justin Pfister's Google News to RSS application. It's a great service, but because it's on someone's personal site it could be gone or unavailable in the future. Google should just give it to us and embed their ads in the RSS or something.

Of course, then the problem, once you have all these results in RSS is helping people make sense of them. Deduping and analyzing the results to be sure you're getting the relevant stuff near the top is no small task, I'm sure.