Ahead of the Curve: Feed Outlook with News You Want

Forewarned is forearmed: stock exchange, price alerts and other breaking news come from all kinds of channels. Consuming them effectively can and oftentimes does make all the difference.

Staying ahead of the curve has become a challenging task, however, as the scatter of news sources has grown tremendously in the last two decades. Crawling the Web is no longer an option if you want to monitor dozens of periodicals for one particular topic.

What if you could make something do this for you; imagine how this thing could crawl the Web using the query you supplied and notify you every once in a while when something new and exciting shows up?

Since you’re reading this blog you may have an idea of what I am referring to: Outlook can team up with your favorite search engine and notify you when new and exciting events occur!

The trick is to create an RSS query for exactly what you would find using a search engine. For example, I used the following query to make Live Search return all the latest references on “Obama’s inauguration”:

Then I pressed RSS on the Internet Explorer toolbar and voilà – Live Search created a perfectly valid RSS feed for me:

The only thing that is left is to add the feed to Outlook and let it do the rest:

• In the main Outlook Window click Tools | Account Settings
• Go to the RSS Feeds tab and click New…
• In the dialog box that appears copy and paste the content of your browser’s address bar. This is how it looks for the query described in my example:
  http://search.live.com/news/results.aspx?q=%22obama+inauguration%22&form=QBNR&format=rss
• Click Add and you’re done!

This will create a new folder under the RSS Feeds folder in the navigation pane. After a short while you will see it fill with short excerpts from the news.

Igor Dozorets

Outlook Software Development Engineer