Google Alerts Drops RSS Delivery Option | Hacker News Reader

Google Alerts Drops RSS Delivery Option

searchengineland.com

54 pointsduncan_bayne29 comments

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The arrogance is quite astounding. The text of the error message:

"Google Reader is no longer available. To continue receiving Google Alerts, change to email delivery."

Apparently the only reason for Google to support RSS was that they had their own RSS aggregator.

Classy move.

If you think that's funny, check out http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/pubsubhubbub-... :

    we encourage providers of feed systems and related tools to connect their
    automated systems for feed acquisition to our PuSH hub (or other hubs in the
    PuSH ecosystem).

    Google directly hosts many feed producers (e.g. Blogger is one of the largest
    feed sources on the web) and is a feed consumer too (e.g. many webmasters use
    feeds to tell our Search system about changes on their sites). Our PuSH hub
    offers easy access to hundreds of millions of Google-hosted feeds, as well as
    hundreds of millions of other feeds available via the PuSH ecosystem and
    through active polling.

You'd think they could have picked a better subject to get people to trust them over, or a better day to post about it

I want to believe otherwise, but is this just a case of being one in the crowd, despite the fact the crowd may be remarkably small?

Google clearly wants to move users to G+, and we've been hearing for years now how "RSS is dead," but perhaps they're onto something? How could they make such a glaring move if it was going to cost them so much reputation?

I, for one, can't do the email option for alerts as well. I've basically stopped using any/all alerts at this point and Google is starting to look like the enemy.

I'm afraid I have to agree - with their war on RSS and their support for EME (basically, DRM) in HTML5, Google is now acting against my interests on two significant issues.

We switched to Mention.net a few months ago after Alerts stopped sending alerts. We used to get hundreds of hits per month and now it's about 1 per month. Mention.net returns everything and more.

Thanks for the hint, I'll check them out.

I've been getting good results with my light use of mention.net, time to expand it.

It's also funny to see how many websites embedded RSS search feeds and are now broken: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Google+Alerts+no+longer+s...

Yeah, I received zero warning about RSS support being dropped from Alerts ... I wonder if anyone received notification, or if it was just turned off?

I asked about this when I heard about the shutdown but no one responded. I guess now we know the answer.

I have contacted them on a number of occasions and while problems often get fixed, including some particularly annoying ones I never get a reply. Not from mails, not from forms.

I strongly dislike this silence but I guess it is effective in reducing feedback.

Shutting down a service is understandable. Giving users several months' notice ahead of shutting down is nice. Telling users, "hey, fyi, this service will have stopped by the time you read this email" is a lousy way to do things, but it's the bare minimum.

Shutting down a service without telling anyone that the service is shutting down (unless someone specifically asks about it) is the kind of thing a fly-by-night startup does right around the time they let their domain expire.

Wow. I think the amazing thing with this whole Google Reader fiasco is not the death of a single product, but rather the apparently systematic destruction of any remaining bastions of trust that the technologically inclined have in Google as a whole.

Google, I'll strangle myself to death with titanium barb wires before I use Google+. Not a single person I know ever updated anything on Google+ and looks more like a well-designed wasteland right now. With these kind of high-handed tactics, I'll make sure to badmouth it as much as possible.

Geez!

Google+ is Google. You'll use it in the end.

>You'll use it in the end.

Apt wording.

Better to use Diaspora. G+ and centralized social networks in general is a dead end, and not something "used in the end".

Diaspora? Is that still going?

Yes, and actively developed too. It could benefit from more developers of course.

Latest Big Brother scandal caused a big influx of Diaspora users by the way, with various refugees from big centralized networks.

https://pod.orkz.net/uploads/images/scaled_full_c6d736391b3b...

> Not a single person I know ever updated anything on Google+

I think the trick is to follow writers and artists, assuming that your friends are not.

http://talkwalker.com bills itself as the best free and easy alternative to Google Alerts. Just started using it a few minutes ago and so far, so good.

This service will turn emails into an RSS stream: http://www.mmmmail.com/

Presumably there are others if this does not meet expectations.

I wonder if services like this will become more popular?

Interesting coincidence - I was just in the middle of analyzing my Alerts since January 2007 looking in whether Alerts stopped yielding many hits. (So far: there is no overall decline except in May/June 2011 when the monthly average total hits abruptly dropped from 254 to 147 for no apparent reason.)

And it's up at http://www.gwern.net/Google%20Alerts

I would love sort of a timeline that documents how Google is slowly abandoning the once embraced "open standards". Federated XMPP for Google Talk, RSS in Google Reader for Google+ feeds etc etc.

Google Alerts hasn't been sending me email for ages anyway. And yet every so often I'll go check on my alerts and there are new pages showing up for those searches.

Just curious how a service like google alerts can be built. Is it all about crawling ? Any light on this please ?

Thanks

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