Good news. Earlier I noted how MSN Search’s RSS feeds wouldn’t bring back results from the main/US MSN Search
if you were outside the US. That seems to have been fixed.
Bad news. If you want to monitor the same query at MSN Search versus a country-specific MSN Search site, they may step on each other.
For example, I want to watch the same
query for MSN Search and MSN Search UK, as they can give different results. Unfortunately, the results for these two different feeds flow into the same
NewsGator folder I use to read feeds, since the title of
both feeds is the same.
Huh? Say you want to watch the query "cars" on MSN Search and MSN Search UK. The URLs for those queries are below. The US one is shown first, then the UK one, with the
difference bolded on the UK one:
Now you decide you want to subscribe to a feed of these results, so you can see how they change over time at both places. At the bottom of the results is an RSS box you can
use to get the feed address. And below, the URLs for those feeds:
- https://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=cars&format=rss
- https://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=cars&format=rss
So far, you can see the difference — one comes from the .com site, the other from the .co.uk site. But the titles of the feeds? Those are the same:
- MSN Search: cars
- MSN Search: cars
As a results, NewsGator puts the content of the feeds into the same place, given the feed titles are the same. Other aggregators might do the same — or perhaps not. But to
be safe, it would be nice if the feed titles reflected that the feeds are different, such as:
- MSN Search: cars
- MSN Search UK: cars