The Google News RSS Feed / Google Reader Mashup

My current employer is an executive search firm recruiting candidates for real estate development and construction. I lead their marketing efforts on the internet, I am also responsible for market research. If I can provide competitive intelligence to industry recruiters in our office, can be used to meet the candidates working executives with employers who need it, but I can not find them yourself.

The challenge

There are a large number of companies worthy of being tracked down by my company. ENR (Engineering News Record) creates a number of specific topics authoritative lists containing the names of the largest commercial construction companies. Builder Online lists the major housing construction companies. Between these two sources, I have identified about 1,700 companies in which it would be useful to monitor any news about them. Fortunately, in a given day, only a small percentage of these companies make the news worthy of note ... However, in order to make sure I get all the information I need to monitor all.

Most logically, I should implement some sort of solution of the RSS in order to track 1,700 companies. Manual entry of 1,700 feed in a feedreader is not an option, I have no programming knowledge, and I do not have a budget to find someone to program a solution.

What have I done?

The solution: Part 1

When I examined a typical Google News RSS URL, you can determine that information only variable within each long URL is the search term:



From this information, I can quickly and simply play a Google News RSS URL for each item in my list quickly and easily in Excel.

I then do the following (which is most clearly illustrated in the attached sheet that I strongly downloaded by clicking on this link):

1) When I open Excel, I put my entire list of companies interested in column B.

2) In column A, I put the first portion of Google RSS URL (the http:// to the variable portion).

3) In column C, put the end of the URL (andoutput = rss).

4) I also know from experience that, in order to make my feeds relevant as possible, I want to use exact match anywhere I can. "22%" is the symbol used for "quotas". I add "22%" as the last character in column A and the first character in column C.

5) I make sure that the code in columns A and C is copied on each line containing a relevant company in column B.

I also need to do the following global column B:

1) Replace "space" and "e" with "+"

2) Replace "+ +" with "+"

3) Delete all instances of "apostrophe".

Here comes the fun part:

1) I widen the columns so that there is plenty of white space to the right of the text in each column.

2) I save the document as a formatted text space delimited (. Prn) of the document.

3) I reopen the document, choose "Delimited", click "Next", and then click "Finish".

4) I then globally replace "space" with nothing, creating the long list of URLs RSS.

The solution: Part 2

(It takes ... breath ...)

In each of the feed readers I've used, I noticed that a mass capable of importing feeds if they are OPML, something I admit to not understanding too well. I realized that if I could convert my OPML URL, so I can get my entire list of companies to RSS news feed in a feedreader. I found Feedshow Goodies (http://www.feedshow.com/goodies/opml/OPMLBuilder-create-opml-from-rss-list.php) through Google dropped my URL in the form can be found on this page, and Click on "Create OPML" (note that can process about 200 URLs at once). So I saved all my OPML file to your hard drive.

Then I made the mistake of thinking that my trusty Feedreader 3.07 would accept 1,700 new clean feed. The first importation of 200 OPML feed eaten all my banda internet and my computer slowed to a crawl. Google Reader was the only other feedreader I've used, so I signed it and uploaded 9 large OPML files.

It worked. Google Reader has allowed me no problems (although a bit slowly) importing 1700 feeds and read them all together, which allows me to get a news update in real time of all commercial and residential construction companies that I wanted to trace.

My public power (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/14537180468496839026/label/main-folder) (Note I configured differently than the sample above).

Tips

1) Even if Google Reader is doing all the "heavy work", open it with monitoring the 1700 feed is the memory hog, especially in IE. I found that opening Google Reader in Firefox or Opera instead significantly cut the amount of memory used.

2) The only disadvantage of this system is that the "title" is the time of each feed Google RSS ugly URL, instead of something more descriptive.

3) If you have a lot of stories in your Google Reader, go to Preferences and check "In Expanded View, Mark items as read as you scroll past them." This feature is of great help in wading through voluminous amounts of data.

4) I discovered that the creation of Google News feed for all news created "last week" gave me the best results. A Google News feed for all news business for each company has led to too much information and news feeds that only covers the day's news stories the past seemed to be missing. In this example, I used URL RSS News is news for all companies, because they are more user-friendly. To use this mashup with "limited time" Google News, you will need to click "Advanced news search" to search the sample with a period of time, generate and copy the URL for RSS news the first part of it in column A of worksheet before you follow the proscribed process.

Now able to monitor all the news from 1700 companies in my Google Reader. Congratulations to those good folks at the 'Plex ....