Garb request to Google Analytics fails from home ISP, but works elsewhere.

Question

I'm trying to use the garb gem to access data from the Google analytics API and find that http requests using garb work just fine from a Linode account, but are refused from home (Comcast). Is Google rejecting some kinds of http requests from certain ISPs, or am I just doing something wrong? Simple example is below:

require 'garb'

Garb::Session.login('[email protected]', 'XXXXXX')
@profile = Garb::Profile.all.first
@report = Garb::Report.new(@profile)
@report.metrics :visits
puts @report.results

This give => [#<OpenStruct visits="21">] on my Linode, but the exact same thing run from my home ISP gives:

Garb::DataRequest::ClientError: "<errorsxmlns=.........

Which is raised here in garb:

def send_request
  response = if @session.single_user?
    single_user_request
  elsif @session.oauth_user?
    oauth_user_request
  end

  raise ClientError, response.body.inspect unless response.kind_of?(Net::HTTPSuccess)
  response
end

The initial session login works just fine from both IPs. The error is only thrown when results are requested. Is there anything I can do to fix this? I haven't (yet) verified that I get exactly the same behavior going through clientlogin/data requests by hand. I'm pretty convinced it is not a gem issue, but an IP-related one--perhaps something to do with Google web services quota policies--but I'm willing to entertain all possible solutions.

Thanks, Orion

Answer 1

You've probably made too many calls to google in a short space of time. I haven't seen it happen with Garb, but I've seen it happen when using an API to scrape search results pages. Google notices and flags your IP. Try browsing to google.com and running a normal google search from the ip that's blocked, you'll probably be required to enter a captcha. They probably block API calls from that IP at this stage, you'll get cleared eventually after a few days I think.