How to add RSS feeds to Google
This is intended as a simple tutorial to help you add RSS feeds to your Google homepage. For a video demonstration of how RSS actually works, check this out: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english.
The ingredients
First, you will need to identify all the feeds that you want to capture. To effectively monitor the blogosphere for conversations about your agency, I recommend that you grab feeds from at least these five search engines. This way you will be sure to get timely coverage of pretty much everything as it happens.
In the search box on each site, type in the phrase that you want to monitor — typically your agency name or project name, etc.,
Select the "Exact phrase" option, and if you are searching for more than one word, eg., Department of X, make sure you put quote marks around the entire phrase.
Hit 'Enter' and your search will be returned.
Somewhere on the page, depending upon the engine you are using, will be a button or link inviting you to subscribe to the feed - it can look like any of these:
Click on the button and you should see a page of XML, but fear not! just ignore it. (If you are using a modern browser like Firefox, it will be human readable). The important thing is to copy the URL from the address bar:
Paste this address into a text file or word document and reserve for later.
Repeat for all the search engines until you have your master list of RSS feeds...
The recipe
Now, open up your web browser and go to the Google homepage, if you have already customized your homepage, skip the next couple of steps.
Click on the link in the top right that says iGoogle.
There may already be some prepopulated feeds there that you can delete, or keep, as takes your fancy. Be ruthless in the beginning and you can always load other stuff back in once you have got the hang of reading and accumulating feeds.
The click on the link on the right to 'add stuff' to your homepage.
This will allow you to add your own custom feeds on to the homepage.
Find the (very small and cunningly hidden) 'Add by URL' link to the right of the search box, and click it.
Start pasting the URLs that you collected from the search engines into the box, one at a time. After you have added a URL, click the 'Add' button.
Almost there.
Once you have added all your links, you simply return to your newly customised homepage by following the link in the top left of the screen:
You can then go in to each of the seperate feeds and edit the settings to customise how they appear on the page - how many links show up etc., 'A' opens the edit settings dialogie box and 'B' sets the display number for items in the feed.
Thats it: all done. Just sit back and, if Google is your homepage, every time you open a browser window you will see exactly what is being said about your agency in the blogosphere.
Once you have got the hang of it, it is simple to add more feeds. A word of warning though: this solution is only really useful for a limited number of feeds and it is not really transportable. Most desktop readers will allow you to export your list of feeds, called an OPML file, and import them into other readers, or – even better – synchronize them with a browser based reader. If you want to really dig into RSS, use a desktop reader or a browser service like Google Reader, Netvibes or Bloglines.