There has been some chatter lately about the death of RSS, but it has been greatly exaggerated. Most of those proclaiming RSS’s demise don’t consider the many uses to which it is put. I also don’t find Twitter to be a satisfactory alternative. I’m aware of only those links I see in the stream when I happen to be paying attention. I can search but will find only those links somebody has thought to post, not everything that matches my interests.

I panicked a bit when I saw Google had removed the subscription option. Would the subscriptions already in my reader (FeedDemon) still capture the latest news items? To my relief, they did. So I copied the URL to one of those feeds, then substituted the keywords for new search terms. I plugged the revised URL into my browser and an RSS feed appeared.

Here’s the syntax:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=KEYWORD&output=rss

Just replace the KEYWORD placeholder with your search term. For multiple words, separate them with + symbols, like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=MULTIPLE+KEYWORDS&output=rss

And to get an exact phrase, add %22 before and after your search terms, like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=%22MULTIPLE+KEYWORDS%22&output=rss

Go ahead and try them—even with the placeholder words in the examples above, Google’s producing results (at least, as of this morning).

Even easier, though, is to start using Bing for your news searches. Bing doesn’t produce as many results but those it does produce are highly relevant. But Microsoft offers the one-click RSS subscription option that Google has abandoned. Bing also lets you select subcategories, as shown here on a search I conducted for “public relations,” while Google only lets you narrow your search by time (last hour, last day, last week, etc.).

I’m probably going to start using Bing’s news search more often because of this. I’m skeptical of those who dismiss Bing based on the fact that Google hasn’t lost any market share since its launch, growing isntead by taking share from other search engines like Yahoo. Changes in habits are gradual and if Microsoft continues to offer features that make its product more appealing, a slow migration could conceivably occur. After all, there was a time when everyone thought AltaVista couldn’t be toppled, when Friendster dominated social networking and Real had the dominant media player.