Bing: Create search result RSS feeds
Bing has a lot of great features under its hood that do not get advertised openly by Microsoft or the Bing Team. Did you know that it offers RSS feeds for all searches that you conduct? This works similar to Google Alerts in that it provides you with the means to get notified when a new post appears in the search results for the selected search term.
The feeds are limited to ten results by default but you can increase that by increasing the number of results shown on Bing's results page. I can't say however if second or third page results will be recognized as well when the RSS feed is updated, or if that is limited to the first ten results. It also seems that while 20, 30 or 50 results are displayed in the RSS feed on the Bing page, they may not be carried over in to the program that you are using to retrieve the feeds.
What's puzzling is that you may get localized results in your RSS feed reader even if the RSS feed itself was displayed in another language by default. You can use the language: parameter to limited search results to a specific language. To display only Spanish results in Bing, use language: es, for English results, use language: en. The space between language: and the language code is important as the command won't be recognized properly if you forget to add it.
So how do you display the url of the RSS feed on Bing's search results page? If you are using the Opera browser you get an indicator in the address bar of the browser. Check out our RSS feed indicator overview for other browsers. There are other options. In Firefox, you can right-click the page and select Page Info, and in the window that opens up the Feed tab to display all feeds found on that page.
There is however an easier way. Just append &format=rss to the end of the url to turn any search results page into an RSS feed automatically.
Even better, you can combine the RSS feed parameter with the search by time parameter that Bing makes available so that you will receive new sites entering the search results more frequently in your RSS reader.
Verdict
Offering RSS feeds for all searches is a great but hidden feature of the Bing search engine. The only thing that I was not able to resolve until now was the language issue. It is likely that the RSS feed is automatically using the local language of the system making the request if a desktop program is used for that. There may be an url parameter that defines the language, but I could not find it up until now.
Yes, I’m having the same issues with the images not showing up. This would be perfect if they did.
Great information …. What to do for images?????
Hi,
Thanks for this info.
I’m using Bing rss news feeds from specific category news searches. The only problem is that the thumbnail images don’t show up when I apply the &format=rss. Do you know of a way to display thumbnail images, when they are available?
Thanks again,
Bev
Nice one this is similar to google alerts