It has come to our attention that more and more of our customers have been seeing problems with Google Blog Search feeds. We have made some modifications since v2.8.5 that seemed to have fixed the issue, but many have continued to see errors saying that a feed cannot be found. However, opening that same feed in a web browser seems to show the feed without problems.

What we have discovered is that Google seems to be cracking down on any automated attempts to use their blog search feeds. We suspect that they are using a combination of techniques, including identifying IP addresses owned by hosting companies, to block these searches. We have tried a number of workarounds but none of them seem to last for long or work consistently across all of our test servers. The reason the feed is not working is because Google is presenting a CAPTCHA which AutoBlogged obviously cannot complete.

Furthermore, Google blog search feeds have long contained syntax and other errors that have thrown off our feed parser. We often wonder if Google intentionally creates these errors just for the purpose of breaking automated feed parsers.

Consequently, we will be suspending support for Google Blog Search feeds.Some people have had success with it while others have not.

While we could play a cat and mouse game trying to constantly find workarounds to their countermeasures, we believe that if a company is going to those lengths to block stuff, we will just take our search traffic elsewhere. There are many companies that embrace the open availability of search results.

We currently have IceRocket and BlogPulse support in AutoBlogged and both of these are great alternatives to Google Blog Search. Furthermore, we have recently found PubSub.com to be an excellent alternative which includes images and even full articles in the feed where available. To use PubSub, simply perform a search and copy the RSS link to use in AutoBlogged.

It is unfortunate that Google is determined to prevent anyone from using their search results, but we are happy to support and recommend (and click on ads) of those companies that provide open access.