Ever since “JR” whined to me about my post on his/her Yahoo! Search Blog, I’ve felt guilty. Here’s an attempt to redeem myself and say something nice about Yahoo! You can use it as an aggregator for RSS feeds. If you need to know what that is, check out Lockergnome’s RSS Resource or Yahoo’s.The unique capability here is Yahoo! Search’s integration of finding RSS feeds and automatically adding them to the aggregator in your My Yahoo!

To accomplish this, use the Yahoo! Advanced Web Search. About one-third of the way down that page is the option to search by file format. I don’t know when they added “RSS/XML”, but it surely is handy. I looked for feeds about “cooking” and only from France, updated within the last three months, in any language. Eh, voila! Up popped 426 interesting results. Number eight included the notation “RSS: View as XML - Add to My Yahoo! [Beta]” When I clicked on that, I went to a sign in page with a preview of how the feed would look. (Why?)

On the My Yahoo! page you can click “Edit” over to the right of the RSS Headlines (BETA) header to adjust how you want the source to display. You can choose headlines only or a short summary and one to ten articles from today to any time, with seven incremental selections in between. In addition, you can rearrange the order of up to 50 sources, delete them, add new ones and Yahoo! will tell you the most popular sources and recommend ones based on sources you already subscribe to. Yahoo! supports RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0. There was no mention of Atom.

You can complain about Georganna’s Yahoo! Search bashing at Writer’s Edge.