Re: Google AJAX Feed API: Lookup Endpoint

[Paul Kist]

Just giving this a bump.   If anyone has any information regarding this endpoint please advise.     The main concern, is this endpoint tied to the Google Reader API?  If so, it's going to be going away.    Any information on this would be great, thank you.

On Tuesday, June 4, 2013 11:01:32 AM UTC-4, Paul Kist wrote:

There are references all over the web to the /lookup endpoint on the the Google Feed API, but there is nothing documented in the official documentation.

e.g. https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/lookup?v=1.0&q=http://www.digg.com

Returns: 

{

• responseData: 

  {

  • query: "http://www.digg.com",
  • url: "http://www.digg.com/rss/top.rss"

  },
• responseDetails: null,
• responseStatus: 200

}

Is this not a supported endpoint?

[Paul Kist]

From the code playground, it looks like lookupFeed is still supported, but again, it's not documented.  Either it's missing from the documentation or something else is going on.  But I haven't found anything out there, about this particular endpoint no longer being supported by Google.  No announcement or warning.....

[Adam Feldman]

Hi Paul,

We removed the documentation a couple years ago because it's generally not a good solution, compared with Find Feed -- it doesn't work as well and is usually not what people actually need.  It received *very* low usage by only a few individuals.

No announcement was made because we didn't remove the feature, so as to not impact the few existing users, but the documentation was pulled because we felt that it didn't add significant value for developers building something new on the API.  Thanks for pointing out that we missed removing the Playground sample - I will get that corrected.

I recommend steering away from the Lookup Feed feature, but I can assure you that the Feed API itself was not impacted by the recent Google Reader announcement.  As in the past, we will continue to post explicitly whenever we have news about changes to this or other APIs.

Thanks,

Adam

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[Paul Kist]

Adam,

Thanks for the reply.   What the Lookup endpoint gives us that the Find doesn't, is the ability to find the RSS feed for a given URL.  The Find endpoint doesn't take a URL as a search parameters, however that's my exact use case.  What's the Feed for a URL?

The Lookup endpoint actually does it very well.    For example:

Vimeo has many RSS feeds in its header.  One might assume that the first one in the list is the most valuable one to have.    The Feed/Lookup endpoint returns the RSS feed for videos as the one feed.   This happens to be, at least from our perspective, the best choice for an RSS feed.    So there is some smart decision making done behind the scenes and it isn't simply just reading and parsing the HTML headers....  this is the what I find valuable about this endpoint.

Is there another endpoint in the Google API that provides access to this info?

Regards,

Paul

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[Adam Feldman]

Hi Paul,

The issue is that it's not always clear what feeds are related to what URLs.  For instance, many sites serve their feeds at a slightly different domain, resulting in them not being found by Lookup Feed.  It has caused confusion in the past, due to apparent errors in not finding desired feeds, and we are unable to improve it along these lines.

If Lookup Feed works for your needs, feel free to continue using it.  However, be mindful that it may not always find what you're looking for.

Thanks,

Adam

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[Paul Kist]

Adam,

From a sample set of queries, it seems to operate like the Google Reader API as far as the results returned.  

Does it use the HTML headers to find the feed?  i've seen cross domain results, like this for example:

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/lookup?v=1.0&q=http://www.gizmodo.com

So I guess my final questions are:

1)  Is there another google api that does serve this information

2)  Could the /Find functionality be used this way (i.e. is there a way for it to accept a URL)

3)  Any other RSS discovery options you might be aware of?  There are a few other APIs that we know of: (Feedly for example), that handles the same use case.

Thanks,

Paul

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[Adam Feldman]

Hi Paul,

I'm not aware of any other APIs (Google or otherwise) to help with this RSS discovery operation.

I've made a note of your interest in this, whether adding it to the Find Feed method or implementing another way, but cannot make any promises at this point.

Thanks for your interest in and feedback on this API!

Cheers,

Adam

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[Paul Kist]

Thanks!   Overall, the endpoint is useful because the logic if finding the RSS for a particular URL is not very cut and dry.   And you guys have done the best job I've seen so far.  To make it more complete, would be to add additional feed URLs as a secondary set of responses, especially the ones that come from the html header.   It would seem as though, it belongs under Find, in the case the criteria was a URL.

At any rate, thanks for confirming, and letting us know why the docs weren't matching the calls.

Paul

Adam

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