Google Reader Can Now Track Changes to Any Website - Even Without a Feed | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader Can Now Track Changes to Any Website - Even Without a Feed

readwriteweb.com

102 pointsAnon8415 comments

Hmmm, I've been working on something like this for a little while now. I guess I'll get to find out what it's like to compete with Google at something.

(I deleted the ragecomment I left immediately after reading this earlier, sorry)

I totally understand you

That's clearly my first thought on every idea now: is google likely to implement that themselves at some point ? (it doesn't block me from trying though)

This has been around for years, through RSSpect (http://www.rsspect.com/) by the wonderful Ryan North.

I just added http://news.ycombinator.com/ as a Google Feed. The results are totally shame - see at http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/3760/screenshotgoogleread...

All entries are linked to homepage. titles are identical. with yahoo pipes every kid can do a better job.

/newest does a bit better, though it gets excited about changes in rating. And articles still aren't linked, though they're at least shown when they're new.

news.ycombinator's root page is a very un-feed-like page, I wouldn't expect any service to handle it correctly.

feedbeater looks like it generates it fine-- e.g.

http://www.diffbot.com/api/rss/http://news.ycombinator.com/

Impressive. I wonder what their change-detection system is.

And, after leaving the Google feed running for a bit, it found 3 new articles in the past day, on /newest. Definitely fail-worthy.

Cool stuff. I have been using Sucuri's Network Integrity monitor for the same thing... I monitor my own sites and some pages that I am interested to be notified when they change.

That can be very useful as an intrusion detection system if your pages are modified without you knowing it.

Link for sucuri: http://sucuri.net

also here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076480

This feature reminds me of diffbot (diffbot.com). I met one of the co-founders (who's out of Stanford) and his demo worked very well. He was using it to check updates on course webpages, for example, so this feature isn't new. It also has some neat uses cases for financial companies tracking lots small snippets of new info.

If you like this, please check out my take on this problem and let me know if you have any feature requests:

http://www.readfresh.com

Good, now if google would only take this idea and apply it to their search. I want full text search on page contents not on the epic tag cloud or other random junk in the sidebar.

Been waiting for this for a while. Already subscribed to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.

Aaaaand it doesn't work. Goldangit.

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