14 DAY TRIAL // Google Reader just got a very interesting new feature, the ability to keep track of any website even if doesn't have an RSS or Atom feed set up. Even if there are plenty of those heralding the impending demise of the technology, most sites these days, certainly all news sites, blogs and any other with episodic content, have a feed, but there are several cases where being able to be notified of an update could come in handy, as Google points out, any kind of product website.
"Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed," Liza Ma, product manager at Google wrote. "These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated."
Clicking on the "Add a subscription" button in Google Reader now allows users to enter any URL and Google will create a feed for the page if it can't find one on the site. Every time the page is updated the users will get a snippet of the changes in Reader. The interesting part is that Google creates an actual feed, so you can grab the URL it provides and then subscribe to it in any feed reader you want.
Google is also giving site owners who don't want their content to be used this way the possibility to opt-out by adding a few lines of code, but by default, everyone is fair game. Google isn't very specific on how it tracks the updates, though presumably the search web crawler is used as it would fit the bill perfectly. However, the crawler can take a few days, even more, to check out some of the smaller and infrequently updated sites. In any case, it's unsure how fast the new feed would be updated when detecting a change, but it is certainly an interesting tool in several specific use cases.