UPDATE:
At some point between 2021 and 2022, Naver unceremoniously disabled the Naver News RSS feeds. Seriously, I cannot find any mention online of their removal. They just plain stopped serving, and the entire newssearch.naver.com domain is gone. I don't see any info on any type of replacement so we can assume their functionality is gone.
Original post remains below only for posterity. It will no longer work.
The basic RSS feed for a Naver News search looks like this:
http://newssearch.naver.com/search.naver?where=rss&query=Microsoft
That's fine to plug into your feed reader if you want to follow a topic casually, but today I'll show how to highly customize the feed so you get exactly what you need. Don't worry if you aren't familiar with Korean or Naver. I'll go through this bit by bit.
Create customized RSS feeds from Naver News searches
There are basically 2 steps to getting your feeds up and running:
- Do a Naver News search (and optionally customize the search parameters to fit your needs)
- Do a simple URL swap to get a feed of the results
Search your keyword on Naver News
First, type your keyword into the main Naver search page, and on the results page chose the "뉴스" category. Alternately, you can head over to Naver News and use the search box there. Either way, you'll end up at the same main results page.
As an example, let's say I want to keep abreast with what Korean news outlets are saying about "Microsoft." [Clearly I would be better off searching "마이크로소프트" in Hangul than "Microsoft" in English, but for the sake of this mini-tutorial I wanted to keep it simple.]
The basic URL for this would be: https://search.naver.com/search.naver?where=news&query=Microsoft
[Optional] Customize search parameters to fit your needs
Now let's say I want to customize the results a bit:
- I want the all and the absolute latest results, not necessarily just most "relevant"
- Within the last month
- And that include a photo
For this, we customize the search filters. Tap the drop-down "검색옵션" (Search Options) menu [right small purple circle in screenshot below] and then adjust the filters [the long purple oval in the screenshot]. These are options like sorting, time frame, content, sources, specific terms, etc. You'll need some Korean skill for this, or else just have Chrome translate for you. [Warning: the page will reload after each filter adjustment]
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| Searching Naver News and applying custom filters |
There are surprisingly a lot of very detailed filtering options you can apply. I won't go through them all here but you can play around with keyword syntax, specific sources, etc. I think the most relevant filters are:
When you're satisfied with the kind of results you're getting, make note of the URL. It will now have several expressions baked into it such as: https://search.naver.com/search.naver?where=news&query=Microsoft&sm=tab_opt&sort=1&photo=1&field=0&reporter_article=&pd=2&ds=2018.04.25&de=2018.05.25&docid=&nso=so%3Add%2Cp%3A1m%2Ca%3Aall&mynews=0&mson=0&refresh_start=0&related=0
- Choosing 관련도순 (by relevance), 최신순 (by latest), and 오래된순 (by oldest)
- Under 영역 you can specify if the term appears anywhere (전체) or specifically in the title (제목). Good for sorting specific articles about your term vs. casual mentions.
- Under 유행 you can specify 전체 (any type), 동영상 (includes video content), 포토 (photo content), 지면기사 (restrict to newspaper printed editions [will even show you the Section and Page number!]), and 보도자료 (press releases)
When you're satisfied with the kind of results you're getting, make note of the URL. It will now have several expressions baked into it such as: https://search.naver.com/search.naver?where=news&query=Microsoft&sm=tab_opt&sort=1&photo=1&field=0&reporter_article=&pd=2&ds=2018.04.25&de=2018.05.25&docid=&nso=so%3Add%2Cp%3A1m%2Ca%3Aall&mynews=0&mson=0&refresh_start=0&related=0
Replace a portion of the URL to get RSS feed
For our customized and filtered search, we need to swap out a portion of our URL. So at the beginning, replace this:
https://search.naver.com/search.naver?where=news
with this:
http://newssearch.naver.com/search.naver?where=rss
So in the end, our final feed URL for our customized news search is:
http://newssearch.naver.com/search.naver?where=rss&query=Microsoft&sm=tab_opt&sort=1&photo=1&field=0&reporter_article=&pd=2&ds=2018.04.25&de=2018.05.25&docid=&nso=so%3Add%2Cp%3A1m%2Ca%3Aall&mynews=0&mson=0&refresh_start=0&related=0
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| Resulting RSS feed, and how it looks subscribed in Inoreader |
Note that, like Google News feeds, these articles in the Naver News feed link back to their original publication sites.
Naver's gone throgh a lot of flack the past month or so, but their news portal still dominates and although I can't seem to find any clear conspicuous links to this RSS service anymore, it's very convenient that they're still providing it.
Remember to use the Hangul version of your search term for better results (my poor "Microsoft" example returned pathetic results, unsurprisingly). It will character-encode the term (with %XX), making the URL huge and ugly, but works fine.
This is really a great tip in my opinion for company SNS managers to keep an eye on things. Most of these news articles can easily be translated within Chrome or via Papago. A great, simple way to automatically keep an eye on mentions of your brand in Korean news cyberspace, without having to manually go looking for them. Set your feed reader to alert you when a new items appears in the feed and BOOM, the Del Monte team can know within minutes about local publicity for their products.
Go wild. Happy subscribing.
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