Google search results are great, but you don’t always want to read them on the google search results page. It would be nice to able to get an RSS feed from your favourite searches, perhaps emailed to you on a daily basis or perhaps used as a feed in your website.
Ways to get Google Search results as an RSS Feed
The old favourite method to get your google search results in either an email or RSS feed is to use Google Alerts.
Google alerts allows you to enter search ‘expressions’ as a normal search term, but instead of showing these results on the screen you tell alerts to email them to you on a regular basis. This is great if you want to monitor your company brand, or a competitor, or any subject that you are interested in.
Why not use Google Alerts is to output the results as an RSS feed. Use this RSS feed to push information into other services. For example many site use RSS feeds as a way of feeding Twitter feeds automatically with specific information. You could use google alerts RSS feeds to add information into your favourite automated tweeting tool.
Perhaps use google alerts to provide an information feed for your website with links to information. This would be updated dynamically by the Google alerts system on a schedule that you decide.
Google alerts are very simple to setup
- Visit Google Alerts.
- In the “Create an alert about” box, enter in the words you want to get email notifications for.
- Click Show options to customize things like how often you get alerts, types of websites you want to search, and the email address for your alerts.
- Click Create Alert.
You can setup alerts to send you results; as they happen (useful to real time monitoring), once per day or once per week.
All good options if you are in the SEO market or just monitoring social mentions of your company. You may also want to look at this great blog post on 10 free tools to monitor social mention online.
When you setup google alerts make sure you use all the search formatting you need to get the accurate results. This includes using operators such as speechmarks around search expressions and the “-” operator to exclude terms you are not interested in. For more details on these operators see this article on advanced search operators with google.
Resources
Article explaining how to use all google alert tools plus their API to get full results from search queries.
You can also use the IFTTT (If this then that) wonderful online tool. This very comprehensive free tool allows you automate many things, one of which is to get information from Google and output the results in many formats. For example you could get ifttt to search google for some information and then automatically email to you on a weekly or daily basis.
Article from wikihow explaining how to use google alerts with pictures (for those that don’t like reading 🙂 )
5 creative uses for using google alerts from the great lifehacker website. A good example from their website article is using google alerts to monitor for certain jobs in specific areas, set this up to alert as they happen so that you can get the heads up on interesting jobs in your area.
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