RSS feeds for Google News search results have been broken for about three weeks, according to complaints in the company’s help forum. Three weeks ago a Google engineer said they expected the problem to be fixed in about a week. Now the company has simply removed the links in the results page sidebar to both RSS and Google Alerts. Oops.

Inbal Drukker, a senior associate at Google News, said on the first and sixth of July that there are “engineering changes” underway to “improve Google News.” So what seems like a loss today could end up for the better in the long run, but for now there seems to be a problem.

RSS, Atom and email subscriptions for new news search results used to appear in the bottom of the left hand column of search results pages. Now there is nothing there. Both products are still available, if troubled, via the browser’s RSS autodetection icon in the address bar and the
product page.
Update:Marjolein Hoekstra points out that there is a link to create a Google Alert now at the very bottom of the search results page, as well as one to create an iGoogle gadget for a search, but still no RSS link displayed like there used to be.
Thanks to Russ Castronovo for bringing this to our attention.