iGoogle Not Following RSS Best Practices
Overclockers Club reports that Google’s personalized homepage has pissed off Slashdot, causing /. to ban Google’s RSS reading IP address for accessing the feed too often. Several users are saying that they see the message “Your headline reader has been temporarily banned” in place of Slashdot headlines, the standard message anyone sees when their RSS reader is querying Slashdot too often. This is what you see right now if you have Slashdot headlines on your Google page:
So, apparently Google has at least cleaned up the problem, but not corrected it. Google is new to the RSS game, so they can’t be blamed for fetching RSS feeds too often, so long as they correct the problem quickly.
Nah, it was just a glitch (both of us, slashdot wasn’t serving feeds properly this morning, and our software reacted strangely), and it has been fixed.
Comment by Chris DiBona | May 26, 2005
hey,
yeah, something was up at slashdot, its own Ask Slashdot and BSD boxes on its front page also showed the blocked error for a while, as if its locked itself out. Doubt its a google thing.
Sadly I’ve managed to loose the screenshots I took of the problem on slashdot this morning.
Comment by R.I.Pienaar | May 26, 2005
Actually … I think they can be, heh. They know about protocol’s, etc, and they know they’re going to be putting a load on slashdot because google gets so much traffic. Google should be cache’ing those rss feeds anyhow. If they checked it once every 15 minutes /. probably wouldn’t temp ban their IP and people viewing the feed on google probably would never feel behind the times. This was just wasn’t thought out well by Google if you ask me.
Comment by matt | May 26, 2005
Thanks, Chris. RSS, while a great technology, still has a lot of performance issues that need to be worked out.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | May 26, 2005
Well, at least it’s fixed now. I didn’t even get to see the glitch, as my personalized Google was looking just fine this morning. But then, I’m on a very different time zone.
Comment by Francis Ocoma | May 26, 2005
I noticed that message too, wasn’t sure what it was all about. Glad you cleared up the problem.
Comment by Ottawa | May 27, 2005