When it comes to news search, Google News gets most of the love. But is that appropriate? Bing News is a good news search engine too. Even if you love Google News, you might find that you discover articles on Bing News that you just don’t see on Google News – that’s certainly been my experience.
Bing News also offers some functionality that Google News doesn’t, like the ability to limit your news search by country or region using the loc: syntax.
I take advantage of Bing’s loc: syntax to do country-specific searches for general keywords. For example, if I tried to do a general Bing News or Google News search for the word “database” I would get overwhelmed with search results. On the other hand, I can do a Bing News search for the word “database” from news stories limited to, say, France, and I’ll get a much more manageable set of results and probably uncover articles that would have been buried in a general Web search.
Since Bing News offers its search results as RSS feeds not only can I search for general keywords in specific countries, I can monitor general keywords in specific countries. And I’ve been doing that for a long time! Way back in 2017 I wrote an article about how to set up a Google Sheet to generate country-specific Bing News feeds en masse. How do you think I’m finding articles about composer archives in Azerbaijan or a specific natural disaster database in Japan? It’s because I’m using keyword-based, country-specific RSS feeds from Bing News.
The Google Sheet tool works okay but it’s missing a couple of features and it’s kludgy to share, so I redid it as a Search Gizmo. Here’s how it works:
1. Enter the Bing News query you want to monitor; you can use any Bing News syntax that you normally would (except for loc:, of course.) There’s a big list here.
2. Tick the boxes of every country for which you want an RSS feed. Orange buttons at the top of each column let you tick all the boxes at once.
3. When you’ve chosen all the countries you want to include, click the big blue button. Country feed will generate Bing News keyword RSS feeds for every country you specified and bundle them into an OPML file which downloads to your computer. Import that OPML file into your favorite RSS feed reader and enjoy your new feeds!
Start with the Bing News query you want to monitor
Choose the countries for which you want RSS feeds
Africa Algeria |
Americas Antigua and Barbuda |
Asia Afghanistan |
Europe Albania |
Oceania Australia
|
