It seems like in the past day or so my Google RSS alerts stopped showing up in Newsblur. Is anyone else having this problem?
I ended up on Newsblur because Google killed their Reader back in the day I looked around, and it appears that Google is now trying get people to use their RSS reader in Chrome and I’m worried that that they did away with their RSS alert system!
I think this is a Google Alerts problem. Periodically I just won’t get any Google Alerts for a couple of days.
I really rely on Google Alerts and the problem got frustrating enough that I figured out how to quickly turn all my Google Alerts into Bing News RSS feeds. Bing News feeds pick up more gunk, but they’re also consistently there. (Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Bing News, or Google Alerts for that matter.)
I don’t think Google will kill its RSS alert system, but nor do I believe that Google Alerts is any kind of priority for them.
Ash, Search Engine Journal posted an article this morning about free alternatives to Google Alerts. I’ve used both Mention and Talkwalker. The free tiers are pretty limited but they DO find things I don’t see otherwise.
I’m seeing this now, e.g., searching for new uses of the word “octothorpe” NewsBlur , which tries to fetch Google Alert - octothorpe
. When I visit that source in my browser, I see it fine. But for the last day, Newsblur reports “Non-xml feed (552)” sadness.