BBC offers infinitely customisable RSS feeds

I’ve only just noticed that the BBC News website is offering its search results in RSS format. They might have been doing this for a while, but they certainly aren’t doing a great job of promoting it… just a reference at the bottom of their ‘what is a news feed’ page.

I’ve always seen RSS-on-search-results as the ultimate solution for mega-content sites like the BBC. It gives you the ultimate flexibility in terms of customising RSS feeds. Maybe you only want stories about your town, or your favourite individual celebrity. Here’s how to do it:

• Go to news.bbc.co.uk.
• Put an appropriate keyword/query into the main search box.
• Click on the link at the top for ‘BBC News & Sport’ results only.
• Use your browser’s autodiscovery method, or pick up the link from the  icon. (Interestingly, the mockup on the instruction page shows the pictorial  icon, which I thought the Beeb were now using as standard.)

User-friendly it ain’t, but being charitable, maybe it’s a ‘soft launch’. You could put a huge amount of strain on your search engine if you handled this badly.