When I was at etech last week checking out all the wonderful things that people are building on the web and with machines I had a number of people ask me about our RSS feeds and what was permissible. As we said in a previous post they are for end-user, non-commercial applications; we released them so that people can track MSN searches via their personal RSS readers. Very specifically not for recreating our search engine on your own website. A perfect example of the type of use we hoped for is Dare Obasanjo’s latest release of RSS Bandit. As he says in his blog:
“Subscribing to Web Search Results: Previous versions allowed users to search Web search engines from RSS Bandit, add search engines of their choice as well as specify whether the results were RSS or not. In this version, users can now subscribe to RSS search results after they are returned. By default, MSN Search and Feedster are installed as web search engines with RSS results.”
He has added them to a (great) non-commercial, end-user app in a way that benefits the user. If there are any more questions use the comments; we read them.
Brady Forrest, MSN Search PM