Google News RSS feeds

It’s possible to get a variety of RSS feeds from Google News, and they all come from Google itself, so they don’t have to be generated with third-party tools like our Feed Creator.

In this post we’ll show you how to get RSS feeds for top stories, topics, search results, and site-specific feeds. Each section will show you how to use Google News to get the news items you want, and then how to get those same results as an RSS feed.

Top stories

Google’s top stories are at: https://news.google.com/topstories

When you load that page, Google will set a country for you (e.g. US or UK) and show you the top stories for the audience of that country. The URL will change to reflect the language and country.

News for a US audience: https://news.google.com/topstories?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

If you’d like the top stories for a different region or in a different language, find ‘Language & region’ in the left sidebar (towards the bottom) and click it. You’ll then be able to select a different language and region.

Google News language and region
Google News language & region selection

After making your selection, the news items will update and if you look at your browser’s address bar, you’ll notice the URL has changed to refelect your selection. Google uses language codes (lowercase letters) and country codes (uppercase letters) in its URLs:

RSS feeds for top stories

To get RSS feeds for the top stories you want, simply replace ‘topstories‘ in the URL with ‘rss‘:

You can make this URL replacement in your browser’s address bar to view the RSS source.

Google News website and RSS feed side by side.

Copy and paste the RSS feed URL into your favourite news reader to subscribe to it and receive updates.

Topics

Google also provides news for different topics:

You can select from a set of main topics using the links in the left sidebar, or use the topic search to find trending topics or search for topics.

Google News topics
Google News topic selection

RSS feeds for topics

To get RSS feeds for topics you want, replace ‘/topics‘ in the URL with ‘/rss/topics‘:

  • [RSS] Technology
    https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqJggKIiBDQkFTRWdvSUwyMHZNRGRqTVhZU0FtVnVHZ0pIUWlnQVAB?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
  • [RSS] Health
    https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqIQgKIhtDQkFTRGdvSUwyMHZNR3QwTlRFU0FtVnVLQUFQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
  • [RSS] Entertainment
    https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqJggKIiBDQkFTRWdvSUwyMHZNREpxYW5RU0FtVnVHZ0pWVXlnQVAB?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

You can change the language and region for topics too in the same way as we did for top stories (either using the Google News interface or by modifying the URL and changing the language and country codes).

Advanced search

Google News also lets you get news items based on your search criteria. Click the arrow at the end of the search field to open the advanced search form.

Google News advanced search
Google News advanced search

Examples:

RSS feeds for advanced search

To get RSS feeds for search results, replace ‘/search‘ in the URL with ‘/rss/search‘:

News from a particular site

What if we’re only interested in news from a particular site? If it’s indexed by Google News we can limit results to that site using the same advanced search fields covered in the previous section.

Not all blogs and news sites indexed by the main Google search engine are available in Google News.

Here’s how you’d get recent news items indexed by Google News from The Grayzone website:

Google News advanced search with Website field filled in.
Telling Google News to return news items posted on The Grayzone in the last week

This will result in the following search query: site:thegrayzone.com when:7d

The Grayzone has its own feed, so unless we want to narrow the search down further, we’d be better off using the official feed. And with Google’s hostile attitude to independent news sites we’d advise against relying on Google News feeds for non-corporate news sources whenever possible.

But there are sites indexed by Google News that don’t publish their own feeds. Using Google News’ feed output, you can get RSS feeds for these sites. Reuters is one example. You can get reuters.com news items published in the last hour using this Google News query: site:reuters.com when:1h

(For sites that don’t publish feeds and aren’t on Google News, our Feed Creator service might help.)

It’s also possible to include a path segment in the site: operator to limit results to a specific category. For example, Reuters publishes its technology news at https://www.reuters.com/technology/, so you can limit Google News results to news items from this category by using: site:reuters.com/technology

RSS feeds for specific sites

We’re still using the search endpoint here, so like before, replace ‘/search‘ in the URL with ‘/rss/search‘:

News from a number of specific sites

One useful feature of Google News is being able to combine searches. We can, for example, tell Google News to return news items from two or three specific sites in a single feed.

After you run a search, you can edit the query by hand in the search field to use additional operators.

Let’s say we want news items from two sites: The Grayzone and MintPress News published in the last 7 days, here’s the query to use:

site:thegrayzone.com OR site:mintpressnews.com when:7d

Want another site, let’s say Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, add that with another ‘OR’:

site:thegrayzone.com OR site:mintpressnews.com OR site:fair.org when:7d
Google News search results for The Grayzone and MintPress News.

RSS feeds for specific sites

As before, we’re still using the search endpoint, so replace ‘/search‘ in the URL with ‘/rss/search‘:

So that’s how you get Google News RSS feeds. If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions, please let us know on our forum.