ShareGoogle have announced that they will be making web search results available as RSS feeds in the future. Reportedly, it will be introduced as an extension of the Google Alerts service, which currently only allows notification by email.
RSS results will allow users the option to follow search results with a feed, giving more flexibility over the way they handle the data. It will even be possible to embed a feed of all the latest results for a search query into their website. Currently, Google is the only major search engine not offering RSS feeds of web search results.
This move is particularly significant for the online marketing field, given the recent measures which Google have taken to prevent automated querying of their servers. This is a trait of some rank checking software which Google previously prohibited in their terms of service. RSS could replace the practise of scraping results in this way, reducing the strain this software puts on its servers, and the skewed search trend data it feeds back into the system.
With any luck, the terms of service for RSS results will be more accommodating than they are currently for those who wish to use the data for rank checking.
Google say that they have not a specific launch date for the update.