Google blocks Yahoo's Pipes The two leading search engines have reached a technical impasse over Google's news service and Yahoo's pipes product.

Pipes is a highly regarded product from Yahoo's Brickhouse team. Users are able to collect data from various sources around the internet, manipulate it, filter it, sort it and then deliver it in another format. For example, with Yahoo Pipes a brand team could monitor news aggregators and blog search engines around the web for mentions of their brand and then deliver this research in one single RSS feed. That's easy to read and easy to monitor.

In the past Google has been used by viruses to query the web looking for forum sites with known vulnerabilities or email addresses. Google's defence to this sort of virus attack is to block automated queries to the search engine and also to Google News.

Google's anti-automated query defense is now blocking the automated queries from Yahoo Pipes. Many of the published pipes in Yahoo's system are now showing as empty and blocked as Google News was an incredibly popular source of information.

Yahoo's Pipes requests for Google News URLs are being forwarded to Google's blocking page. Google is treating Pipes as a virus or other unwanted computer request.

Google blocks Yahoo's Pipes

Yahoo Pipes fail gracefully. Pipes constructed from various information sources continue to work and simply exclude the feeds taken from Google. One of the features that sets Yahoo Pipes aside is their unique visualisation of the information stream. Pipes sending data are highlighted in light blue whereas empty pipes, such as those now being blocked by Google, appear in dull grey.

Tim O'Reilly described Yahoo Pipes as a "milestone in the history of the internet" when it launched and Nic Cubrilovic of TechCrunch said, "...my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes."

It is within Google's ability to 'whitelist' Yahoo Pipes and allow the internet application to successfully auto-query the search engine, news and blog search. Until the impasse is resolved, however, Pipes may struggle to remain useful.