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He mentions that they dropped the RSS functionality, but this is not the case at all. If you edit one of your existing alerts, you can change it to a feed.

Ref: http://www.google.com/alerts/manage



Verified.

But the blog post OP cites provides some convincing evidence that they were gone for at least a moment last July. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/07/google-alerts-drops...

I guess they changed their mind and brought them back? Weird.


It may have had something to do with the Google Reader shutdown. The reason I say this, is that I just recently launched an RSSOwl instance, where I had populated RSSOwl with a list of feeds some time ago... including quite a few Google Alert RSS feeds. Strangely none of the Google Alerts were working, and when I started investigating, I found that all of them had a path that included something like

$BLAH/reader/$BLAH

which suggests that, when those feeds were originally created, the delivery mechanism somehow involved GReader.

I went back to Google Alerts and re-copied each of the feed URLs and see that in the new URLs, the path looks like:

$BLAH/alerts/$BLAH

Not definitive, but it hints at some kind of connection.


As jrochkind1 says, they certainly did drop the RSS feeds, but restored them recently. I'll update that detail, but I can't help but suspect that I'll be needing to go back and update it again in the near future...




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