Google News Alerts - article extraction?

problem
1

Hello!

I’ve got what may be an unsolvable problem by Newsblur, but I thought I’d try anyway.

Issue: I have a number of custom Google news alerts which were converted into RSS feeds many years ago. They continue to work just fine for their intended purpose. However, when I click on an article in the Newsblur iOS, iPad, or Web interface, I only get the article title, and maybe a sentence from the actual article.

I realise that’s likely exactly what Google wants, as to see the full contents they want someone to click through, show ads, extract your DNA, sell it to a LLM, etc etc.

However, a number of RSS readers work around this somehow and extract the content itself.

For example, if I use ReadKit on my iPad or iPhone, and point it to Newsblur, and select an article and have ReadKit in “Reader” mode for that feed, the article content appears – not always, it’s not 100% of the time, but, it’s more than enough for me.

With Newsblur, however, the native apps at least, I may see a brief error about being unable to fetch text when I select an article and that’s it.

Since this works when Newsblur is the back-end for other RSS apps, it’s likely some client-specific thing that’s not working for this type of feed.

If this is more of a “feature request” and not a “problem” I’m happy to delete this post (or The Powers That Be can).

2

Got an example feed I can take a look at?

3

Yes, try:

https://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/13613501410405625340/12731662143552072270

Thank you for taking a look!

4

Found it! Google Alerts wraps every article link in a google.com/url redirect that returns a JavaScript redirect page instead of a real HTTP redirect. So when NewsBlur tries to fetch the original text, it gets a tiny Google page instead of the actual article.

Just pushed a fix that extracts the real URL from those redirects, both when storing new stories and when fetching original text for existing ones. Should be deployed shortly.