PubForge Blog

I found an interesting feature of the Google News Service. We had our RSS feeds added to Google News’ sources, so our news stories show up in the local news page. I noticed that when one of our stories showed up as a Google News Alerts email, there was link at the bottom to stories on the same topic. The url included a parameter named “ncl” that was set to the url of our story, like this: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=http://www.
ksmu.org/content/view/4390/66/

So I asked myself, could I put any story url into this parameter and get relevant results? It turned out, no. But, you can get an RSS feed of your site’s news through Google News like this: http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en
&q=site%3Aksmu.org&output=rss

I found this url by searching Google News based on the “site:ksmu.org” search term. There is a link on the page for an RSS feed. The useful thing about this feed is that each story can have it’s url fed into the ncl parameter and returns a page of other stories on the same topic. The true relevance of each result is arguable, but it usually does a pretty good job. You can turn the results page into an RSS feed by adding an “output=rss” parameter, like so: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=http://www.
ksmu.org/content/view/4390/66/&output=rss

You can also control the number of results by adding a “num=10″ or whatever number onto the url.

Having figured this out so far, I decided to build a Yahoo Pipe to fetch the RSS feed of our stories in Google News and get a specified number of related stories for each one. The pipe then turns this back into a stream which can be used as an RSS feed or JSON or other types. You can try it here.

I’m not really sure what to do with it now, though. How would you use such a tool?