Get Yahoo! Searches Delivered To Outlook’s RSS Reader
Inspired by Dan Lynch’s Google Your Family Tree I learned that many of the techniques taught in his book for searching with Google will also work with Yahoo!. In experimenting with Yahoo! I also discovered that Yahoo! has a feature that Google seems to lack.
What I discovered was with Yahoo!, Internet Explorer 7 or above, and Outlook 2007 you can get updates from previous searches delivered right to your inbox (RSS inbox, that is).
When you peform a search on Yahoo! using IE 7 you will notice up on the Internet Explorer toolbar an orange and white button next to the Home button.
This button indicates that the page you are viewing also supplies a RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for content publishers to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers. These RSS feeds are XML documents that are normally viewed with a "feed reader" and if you have Outlook 2007 you already have a feed reader.
If you click on the RSS button on the IE 7 toolbar you see a drop-down listing the one feed associated with the Yahoo! search results page. Click this and the next page displayed is a transformation of the underlying XML feed.
Near the top of the page you will see a description of the feed along with a link inviting you to subcribe to the feed. Clicking this link will add the RSS to Outlook 2007 and in a few minutes you see the feed items appear as mail items in Outlook.
Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to subscribe to an RSS Feed is quick and easy and does not involve a registration process or fee. After you subscribe to an RSS Feed, headlines will appear in your RSS folders. RSS items appear similar to mail messages. When you see a headline that interests you, just click or open the item. To remove a subscription to a RSS in Outllook go to Tools | Account Settings from the main menu and select RSS from the Account Settings dialog.
RSS Feeds can also displayed on your web-site. You can see how that is being done here at Gathering Leaves by going to "Search Feeds".
One final note is that Google did introduce RSS feeds to Google Alerts in October, 2008, but this feature does not work the same way as it does with Yahoo! (see Feed me! Google Alerts not just for email anymore)
