Google Inc. started offering news feeds over Atom, a syndication format used to publish headlines of the latest updates on blogs and web sites.
Atom 0.3 support has been added to Google News, which is based on the RSS 2.0 standard, is under the control of the Internet Engineering Task Force. “We’ve launched this service because we’ve had a lot of requests from Google users to support RSS and Atom” a Google UK spokeswoman explained.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds are typically distributed to newsreaders that aggregate headlines from multiple web sources. Most large content publishers today distribute information over either, or both, formats. The RSS and Atom feeds are being initially offered on just six versions — U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, U.K. and India.
Google, based in Mountain View, is supplying feeds for Top News, World, US, Business, Health, Sports, Entertainment and Science/Technology.
