Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to at least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

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How to Get the Feeds

All the other major search engines make it really easy to grab a feed for any web search, but Google is probably concerned about spammers finding bizarre and unscrupulous uses for its feeds. We're all inconvenienced as a result.

To get a feed for a Google search you have to go to the web page for Google Alerts and set up an alert for your search. You can enter most queries here, including site: queries. (site:http://readwriteweb.com semantic for example.) You should select "web" instead of the default "comprehensive" if you're just interested in tracking web search results.

"Feed" isn't an option in the initial drop down menu of delivery options, you've got to select email first. After you've done that, look at your collection of alerts and click to edit the one you want by RSS. At this point "feed" is an option in the drop down menu. Select it and you'll be shown an RSS URL. Throw that puppy in your favorite feed reader and you're ready to rock and roll.

The feed will deliver any new links that show up in the top 20 search results for your query. That's pretty limited, but most people don't look beyond the first 20 results anyway. That means that this is good for high-level reputation tracking but not very good for discovery of new, more obscure pages of interest.

The RSS URLs that Google gives you are based on an arbitrary number and don't contain the text characters of your query. That means you can't build more feeds by simply editing the URLs, you have to go back in through Alerts and repeat the proccess for every feed of interest.

Update: One day after we wrote this post, the official Google Blog just announced the availability of feed alerts as well.

More Advanced Options

Here's how we're using the new Google search feeds. We've grabbed feed URLs for searches for A. our names, B. our company name, C. our company URL and (just for fun) one for each of those three items without the other two. For example: "Richard MacManus" -readwriteweb -http://readwriteweb.com.

That gave us a small pile of feeds, which we then ran through our favorite RSS splicing and deduplication service (we used Yahoo Pipes but if you're not comfortable with Pipes then Feed.informer.com is really easy to use). We spliced all these feeds together, filtered for duplicates and then threw the resulting feed into our highest priority feed reading system.

Now we can track our high level reputations constantly, without being paranoid about it. We might do this for concept searches as well so that if someone new starts ranking really high for topics we specialize in (semantic web, RSS) then we'll know about them and never look ignorant at parties.

If we were interested in getting an RSS feed for Google web search for discovery, more than just reputation tracking, we might do an "advanced search," increase the results displayed from 10 to 100 and then use Dapper.net to scrape a feed of results from that page.

All of this is more complicated than it ought to be, but once you set up even the most basic feed options then you don't have to think about it again. Though it isn't perfect, we do appreciate Google making these feeds available.

nightmarebrunette:

sachafedor: fish_bear

There's no need to punch a hole in your roof and ceiling if you have a SkyV HD Virtual Skylight from Sky Factory. Sure, you've been able to get Sky Factory's fake skylights with static scenes for a while now, but this is way better than that. Behind that convincing-looking window frame lie three HD LCD displays, showing scenes of fantastic skies, changing seasons, birds flying over, trees swaying in the breeze, and changing seasons from all over the world.

This is a fantastic idea. We'd like to see the concept taken even further, with the displayed scenery corresponding to the time of day and season. Or how about mounting an HD camera outside your locale, and seeing the sky as it looks at that moment? Or at night, slap a telephoto lens on that baby and zoom in for tight shots of the moon, stars, planets and galaxies.

Click Continue to see an autoplaying video of the SkyV in action:

I am running Vista 64.

You will need:

- MS Virtual PC 2007 (avail for free from MS)
- Win98 SE (readily avail as a torrent)
- Burn:Cycle

When launching Virtual PC, make sure to right-click > run as admin otherwise you may get ‘this is not a valid win32 app’ errors when trying to run the game in the VM.

As for the VM settings, VPC has settings for win98 which I left default except for disk size which I set to 512MB (could be set smaller I suppose) since this was only for B:C and win98 is only a couple hundred megs big.

Enjoy!

(;||<

Robert Eringer wrote an article posted to cryptome.org that covered the frequently suggested threat of trojaned chips installed into all manner of equipment made from Chinese parts or assembled in China. Manchurian Microchips is a cool name for them.

“It is there, deep inside your computer, if they decide to call it up,” the security chief of a multinational corporation told The Investigator. “It is capable of providing Chinese intelligence with everything stored on your system — on everyone’s system — from e-mail to documents. I call it Call Home Technology. It doesn’t mean to say they’re sucking data from everyone’s computer today, it means the Chinese think ahead — and they now have the potential to do it when it suits their purposes.”

This is pretty sensational stuff. Of course, we can’t completely discount this as a possibility. At present, the computer attacks on DoD, defense contractors, foreign governments and dissident groups that have been detected and attributed to China have used typical methods like exploits and social engineering. But maybe they are saving this capability for a special occasion.

In June 2007, a Pentagon computer network utilized by the U.S. defense secretary’s office was hacked into — and traced directly back to the Chinese PLA.

The previous statement isn’t entirely accurate. I don’t believe the Pentagon ever claimed to have traced the attack directly back to the PLA. I think everyone involved probably assumed that based on the type of information that was taken from the compromised computers.

The Chinese had specifically targeted Rolls-Royce and Shell Oil.

The attack on Rolls-Royce used social engineering emails with MS Office exploits. The exploits downloaded PC Share 2005. Nothing too sophisticated.

The author points out that all computers today are either assembled in China or manufactured with parts from China. The implication is that potentially all computers could have corrupt supply chains. This is probably far-fetched. If I were a hostile nation that supplies chips to computer manufacturers, I would probably only use it to permanently disable the computers instead of for intelligence collection. I would probably also target networking gear rather than computer workstations and servers. The investment in that capability would be too great to risk loosing to network detection. It would be better to use it as a way to instantly cripple an adversary’s information advantage.

On 1 September, we brought you a story about Chinese hackers breaking into the Tsinghua University website to criticise the education system.

Not enough said Chinese hackers! Just 21 days later, Beijing University suffered a very similar attack:

At around 11pm on Friday night, Peking University’s website was hacked and an article, purporting to be authored by the president of the university, Xu Zhihong, was added to the site. The article was a well-written attack on China’s education system entitled something like “University Education at the crossroads: Rethink or continue to corrupt?” 《北大校长许智宏———大学教育，反思还是腐烂？》. It called for structural reform of China’s higher education system and specifically pointed out the need for the strengthening of moral education and for getting rid of incompetent professors who leached on the university system.