Google News removes the RSS link from the footer after less than a year of suffering its existence

When I wrote “Google News unhides the RSS option – it may not last” and cross-posted it to CodeProject, the article did not last long. It was deleted after a week because they said at that time “it has an inappropriate content as judged by our readers and editors”. Probably, they appreciated Google’s good turn and were disappointed with my pessimism.

Anyway, my prediction has come true. Google News has covertly removed the RSS link!

From my previous post from 2017, here is the Google News footer with the RSS feed link. It lasted less than a year.

Last year, Google News RSS feeds had an extra news item in which they said the old RSS links were deprecated and the new format RSS links would be available in the footers of Google News pages. You see, a few years earlier, Google has been quietly removing the footer RSS links and HTML “link” tag support from many of their products. So, it was naturally unbelievable when they put it back. The RSS feeds continue to insist that the RSS feed is in the footer. The redundantly configured URL news.google.com/news redirects to a default Google news now.

Have you noted how the languishing Google-owned BlogSpot.com has also removed RSS/Atom links? RSS was the primary way blogs were read by their followers. A glance at the RSS-based blogroll on the side of blogs would instantly tell other bloggers and blog followers what was new that was published.  No third party, no algorithms, no censors,  no self-appointed purveyors of fake news (ostensibly to protect the millennials) were involved. Now, whatever blogs that remain are left to the mercy of social media sites.

The unofficial war against RSS continues…

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UPDATE: I cross-posted this article to CodeProject, for the I-told-you-so. They deleted the article saying the article was news-type and not technical.