thearchivist.funGoogle Reader is retired, and its feed history is copied
On 13 March 2013 Google announced that Google Reader would be retired on 1 July. The company said usage of Reader had declined and that it was focusing on fewer products. It pointed users to Google Takeout to export their subscriptions. The Archive Team wiki describes what happened next. A group led by a volunteer called Ivan collected historical feed data through Reader's own API before it was switched off, which the page records as happening soon after midnight Pacific time on 2 July. Takeout exports stayed available until 15 July. The collected data is about 8,800 GB, stored as WARC files and indexed so individual records can be located, and it is held at the Internet Archive. Reader was a reading tool, not a publisher. Its loss did not remove any blog. It removed a shared place where years of subscriptions, folders and cached feed items were kept, and it showed that a copy of a feed's history can exist only inside the reader that fetched it.
Context and provenance
Treat the Reader archive as a reminder that the hosted reader, not the original site, often holds the only long run of an item's earlier versions. The wiki itself says there is no convenient tool yet for reading one feed back out of the archive, so being preserved and being easy to use are different states.
A careful citation separates three things: Google's announcement, the days when the service was actually reachable, and the volunteer collection stored later. When you quote a feed item from the collection, say that it comes from the Archive Team index and give the file you read, since the wiki warns that retrieval tools are limited.
Transmission timeline
- 2013-03-13
Google announces the retirement of Reader.
- 2013-07-01
Announced retirement date.
- 2013-07-02
Per the Archive Team page, Reader and its API are turned off soon after midnight Pacific.
- 2013-07-15
Takeout export window closes at noon Pacific, after which Google deleted the data.
Why it matters
A subscription service quietly acted as a long-term memory for the open web's feeds, and its closing showed how much of that memory sat in one company's database.
What remains uncertain
The number of feeds in the Archive Team collection is not stated. The wiki gives July 2 as the switch-off, the announcement gave July 1; both are shown.
Sources and evidence
- Laughing Squid: Google discontinuing Google Reader as part of spring cleaning
Announcement date, 1 July retirement, the stated reason, Takeout export advice.
- Archive Team wiki: Google Reader
Greader-grab project, roughly 8,800 GB, WARC and index format, Takeout deadline, location at the Internet Archive.
Editorial review: 2026-10-22. New evidence may change this account.