How to save search engine results as an RSS feed

Did you know that you can save the results of a search as a feed and get embed code for that feed to display in a web page?

Here’s an example of a web page that is being fed with the results of the search: “content curation” from the Bing search engine.

Here’s how it works:

1. Type your search query into http://bing.com. For example, type:

“content curation”

2. On the results screen in the address bar, erase everything after your search terms:

before: http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22content+curation %22&go=&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=%22content+curation%22&sc=8-18&sp=-1&sk=

after: http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22content+curation%22

(If your search has quotation marks around the words, be sure to include the %22 before and after the keywords. It represents the quotation marks).

3. Next, append this to the URL: &format=rss

Here’s how your feed will look:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22content+curation%22&format=rss

Use this type of feed to get continually updated search results on any topic you like! Subscribe to it in your feed reader, or embed the results in a webpage using FeedWelder or other mashup tools.

Here’s another example of a webpage being fed with the results of a saved search.
Location-Independent Lifestyle: saved searches

In a future post I’ll show you how to use FeedWelder to combine multiple feeds and get embed code for your website. Feedwelder is much easier than Yahoo Pipes for this type of task.