When working with environmental scanning, competitive intelligence scanning, industry monitoring, corporate reputation monitoring or any similar activity, many people use a feed reader and organize feeds on their topics and keywords of interest. A wide choice of feed readers exist, and should I mention just one, that is probably NetVibes.com. NetVibes.com is one step ahead since this (free) service allows you to organize feeds and many other types of content in a collection of tabs of your own design – all of it kept online for access and use from anywhere.
While this approach to scanning, monitoring and collecting is working fine for many people, a problem shows up when you want to monitor search results from some search engine or directory which does not provide the results as a feed of any kind. For example, this is the case when you do a regular web seach with Google: the resuts cannot be obtained formatted as an RSS or Atom feed. So, if you are monitoring PDF documents issued by the US government or US military about piracy in the Gulf of Aden, using the following query: "Gulf of Aden" piracy ext:pdf site:(.mil OR .gov), then you cannot get those search results as a feed from Google.
The solution is to use one of a number of free services that formats any web page into a feed, making it readable and presentable by any feed reader. Raju, the owner and editor of TechPP, made a list in April 2009 of what he considers to be the top 10 services of this kind: Top 10 Free Tools to Create RSS for Any Website.
The services listed by TechPP are:
iOSINT - information on Open Source Intelligence 