MSN Search to RSS

In the never ending search for RSS search feeds, it appears MSN now allows you to subscribe to the results of your query. If you haven’t gotten your brain wrapped around this concept, you need to. Right now. You can be researching 24/7 if you have RSS feeds which are bringing search results to you (or your students). Enter your search once, create the feed, plop it in your aggregator and sit back and watch what happens.

I just love this stuff. Really. I do.

Actually, if you haven’t played with the fairly new MSN Search tool, you might want to check it out. The search builder tool makes it easy to focus your results by terms, location, domain, language and, even more importantly, by how recent and how popular the source of the result is. You can go and watch the build of your query, but if you don’t want to leave your aggregator, here’s what my search for “library and wiki” looks like:

wiki library loc:US language:en {mtch=100} {popl=84} {frsh=81}

Terms, location, language, 100% match, must be in the 84th percentile of popularity and 81st in freshness. The URL ends up looking like this:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=wiki+library+loc%3AUS+language
%3Aen+%7Bmtch%3D100%7D+%7Bpopl%3D84%7D+%7Bfrsh%3D81%7D&FORM=QBRE

Now, if I want to subscribe to that search, I just add “&format=rss” to the URL, like so:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=wiki+library+loc%3AUS+language
%3Aen+%7Bmtch%3D100%7D+%7Bpopl%3D84%7D+%7Bfrsh%3D81%7D&FORM
=QBRE&format=rss

Pop that in my Bloglines account and I’m a happy researcher. Whaddaya know? I’ll keep you posted on how relevant that search turns out…