How to Use RSS to Subscribe to Search Results on Bing

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Have you ever wanted to subscribe to a search engine results page? Me neither. But with Bing, you can! In this tutorial, we'll learn how to use RSS to subscribe to the search results on Bing. This could be useful if there's some case where you search for the same thing over and over again expecting different search results. I'm sorry but I have no idea what you could use this for.

Google doesn't have this feature apparently, nor do any of the other search engines I tried, so if someone ever asks you "what can Bing do that Google can't," the answer is RSS feeds for SERPs, apparently!

To subscribe to Bing's SERP, follow the following steps:

1: install an RSS client, which you'll need to use RSS.

2: search for something that you expect to have different results if you searched for it again at a later time, like... uh... I don't know. I really have no idea. I guess the only thing I can think of is if you're searching for something that doesn't exist, and if you keep searching for it, then if one day it does come to existence you'll be notified of it via the search engine? That sounds okay, I guess. Alright, let's say we search for "good social media platforms."

If you do this, the URL on your address bar will contain all sorts of irrelevant parameters. We can remove most of them and leave just:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=good+social+media+platforms

3: add &format=rss to the URL, like this:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=good+social+media+platforms&format=rss

4: add this URL to your RSS client. You're now subscribed to a search query!

Tip: it's a good idea to set the frequency of updates to weekly or monthly in your RSS client to avoid issues. The results shouldn't significantly change more often than that. The default on some clients is to check hourly, so Bing may think you're a bot if you keep searching for the exact same thing every hour.

News Search

This trick also works with Bing news search.

https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=good+social+media+platforms&format=rss

Observations

This trick doesn't work Bing image search, video search, or shopping search.

Written by Noel Santos.

About the Author

I'm a self-taught Brazilian programmer graduated in IT from a FATEC. In a world of increasingly complex and essential computers, I decided to use my technical expertise in hardware, desktop applications, and web technologies to create an informative resource to make PC's easier to understand.

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