Yesterday afternoon, all my Google News RSS feeds stopped working. I and my friend Gary Price from infoDocket spotted the issue early on. The RSS feeds from Google News were showing “this RSS feed URL is deprecated.” It goes on to say “this RSS feed URL is deprecated, please update. New URLs can be found in the footers at https://news.google.com/news.”

I thought this can’t be right, we all know old RSS feed URLs can be 301 redirects to the new URLs automatically. But for some reason, Google is not doing that.

Google later posted in the Google News Help forums this message:

So it seems that I will now need to go through hundreds of my RSS feed subscriptions and update the URLs manually and kill off the older ones.

To make it worse, it looks like all the existing RSS feeds are a mess. They are returning irrelevant results in the old feeds. So it feels like I need to update all the URLs right now, and I don’t have until December 1st to make the switch.

For example, here is a CIA article that came back for Eric Schmidt of Google:

I am surprised more folks are not complaining about this. I wish I had more time to prepare for this before all the news feeds went haywire.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Update: 24 hours later from posting this story, the news results even on the older feed URLs have become better quality. I will be updating my feed URLs manually in the short term, as Google never got back to me on the redirect question.