Comments on: Google announces new AJAX Feed API

By: vidaldewit

vidaldewit — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:21:10 +0000

Hi Everybody, I’ve just finished my new job search engine based on Google AJAX Feed API.
JobGeni – The Realtime Job Aggregator http://www.jobgeni.com pulls the data from several major job sites like indeed, simplyhired, yahoo hotjobs, monster and jobster.

By: Adnan Siddiqi

Adnan Siddiqi — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:56:21 +0000

no comparion between Feed API and Pipes.

By: henry turner

henry turner — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:10:06 +0000

Does this technology just use document.write and some dynamic script insertions or something? It can’t be Ajax if the proxy is on google’s domain and my page is on my domain.

By: Kevin Burton

Kevin Burton — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 04:35:29 +0000

This has actually been available for a while. It just wasn’t really obvious.

We have a lot of people using Spinn3r for similar purposes and solve the same goal. Basically a way to get access to feed data without all the difficult and painful issues of crawling or parsing.

The problem with the Google Feed API though is that you have to know the feed before hand. We mostly deal with BULK access right now. 250k feeds, 1M feeds. etc.

What’s really cool is that we have about a 1/2 dozen PhDs using it right now which is kind of fun.

By: Richard Marr

Richard Marr — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 08:50:01 +0000

Guys, they’re not using AJAX, so there is no domain constraint. The only reason you need a proxy is to convert the RSS/whatever into Javascript.

Moreover Technologies (bought by Verisign a while back) has been doing this exact thing for years, except in any output format you like and with a contextual advert added at the top.

By: Ben B

Ben B — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:43:22 +0000

I think it is great services are coming out but as I wrote here:
http://www.techthoughts.com/techthoughts/2007/04/google_ajax_fee.html
why not charge a fee like S3 and allow people to make services that actually make money. Note the following from the terms of use:

5.6 You agree that if you use the Feed API to develop a service for
other users, it must be made accessible to your end users without
charge.
I would love something like this – much like how S3 provides cheap grid function for small companies – without having the constraints.

By: Bud Gibson

Bud Gibson — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:49:52 +0000

Looks their recent hiring of Mark Pilgrim might have been to support his universal feed parser that probably underlies this offering.

By: Edward Ho

Edward Ho — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:05:15 +0000

This is really cool! I’ve noticed some people using Pipes to do the same thing, but this is much cleaner and should be much faster.
-edward

By: Kris Zyp

Kris Zyp — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:52:19 +0000

Using a proxy is certainly not a new idea. It is nice of them to provide a proxy though.

By: Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:35:15 +0000

Henry,

They don’t get around the security constraints as they get the feeds through a proxy at Google (which happens to be on a nice fast edge cache).

You can read more at the FAQ: http://code.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=11330.

Cheers,

Dion

By: Marc

Marc — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:45:45 +0000

here’s the link: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/

By: henry turner

henry turner — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:43:34 +0000

So how do they get around the JavaScript security constraints?

By: Marc

Marc — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:26:32 +0000

aha… I was waiting for that to happen… http://braincast.nl/pivot/entry.php?id=23