Bring me my news! Very customized!
February 5, 2011 6:44 AM

How do I create an RSS feed to filter news items based on about 300 keywords?

I want to monitor certain news sites (e.g., Rolling Stone) for news about certain music artists and have the results delivered via RSS. The only problem is, I have a list of about 300 artists. Google limits its queries to 32 words, and some of the RSS filtering services time out at about the same length. What's the best way to do this without blowing up teh Internets?
posted by adverb to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
Can the filtering services or google exclude results instead of including them? If you filter out the most popular 32 artists you don't care about, what you end up getting will be pretty close to what you want.

Otherwise, set up 10 different queries.
posted by gjc at 6:48 AM on February 5, 2011


You could probably do that with Yahoo Pipes.
posted by COD at 7:19 AM on February 5, 2011


Feed Rinse can exclude results. Create a Channel of your RSS feeds then apply filtering rules to the Channel.

The resulting "rinsed" feed has its own RSS link, so you can bring it into Google Reader or wherever you use RSS.

I prefer Feed Rinse over Pipe for simple filtering. I've tried to wrap my head around Pipes, but it cripples my self esteem quickly. You can "clone" existing Pipes, so something may exist that does what you want already.
posted by smoochbelly at 8:52 AM on February 5, 2011


Is the delivery of filtered results required to be via feed? What about grabbing the site's feeds yourself and then doing the processing? (This of course assumes every place you want to watch offers a feed.)

Many feedreaders you can install on your own machine can monitor for terms in your feeds and collect them. I know FeedDemon(Windows) and NetNewsWire(OS X) can do it. 300 might be pushing things a little, at least from a UI perspective, but maybe you can group them somehow.
posted by Su at 8:56 AM on February 5, 2011


You can also try Yahoo! Pipes.
posted by kenliu at 10:19 AM on February 5, 2011


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