Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land points out that Google Alerts Drops RSS Delivery Option, which is pretty upsetting. The message says that “Google Reader is no longer available,” and says users need to switch to email alerts.
Seems that Google is either just dumping RSS wholesale or that the feed engine that ran the RSS alerts was part of the Reader infrastructure. (You can still subscribe to Google News alerts by RSS, and news search terms, it seems, so I have no idea what the link is.)
As commenters point out, this is going to break a lot more than simply Google Alerts. A lot of websites embedded feeds into their sites using Google RSS alerts:
It’s an odd state of affairs for Google, which either didn’t anticipate the backlash or is so intent on chasing Facebook that it doesn’t care.
Another option suggested by commenters: Talkwalker Alerts – The best free alternative to Google Alerts. It even looks like Google Alerts:
Haven’t tried it but seems to offer the goods.
Hi Jeremy! Nice to see that I appear in your article 🙂
Julie, thanks, and your service looks good. What sources does it use?
Our team has developed a crawling technology since 2009, resulting today in an index of over 100 million sources in blogs, forums, online news and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. (Social media sources aren’t available in the free alerting tool though, but in the full social media monitoring tool simply called “Talkwalker” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=544181112305560).
You could try this service. Alerts to RSS are about to launch a replacement for Google Reader providing an RSS feed for Google Alerts at http://alertstorss.com
Hi Jeremy, to keep you updated on our product: Talkwalker Alerts are now also available on HootSuite! To try it out yourself, simply install the Talkwalker Alerts app on HootSuite to monitor and share content the fastest way in one single platform. More info at http://bit.ly/1aW01hb – let me know how it works for you 🙂