Google Finance no longer providing data

[lerenardmewa]

getFinancials no longer retrieves financial data from Google Finance:

getFinancials("AAPL")
Error in download.file(paste(google.fin, Symbol, sep = ""), quiet = TRUE, :
cannot open URL 'http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=AAPL'
In addition: Warning message:
In download.file(paste(google.fin, Symbol, sep = ""), quiet = TRUE, :
cannot open URL 'http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=AAPL': HTTP status was '404 Not Found'

Moreover, seems like Google is no longer providing this info.

[mtbakerguy]

Trying it on OSX, you get the following:

getFinancials('AAPL',auto.assign=FALSE)
Error in thead[x]:thead[x + 1] : NA/NaN argument

Looking at the (still HTTP; yay!) packet trace: it looks like there's a redirect.

[msmith01]

I get the same error

Error in thead[x]:thead[x + 1] : NA/NaN argument

Also using; quantmod::getFin("COP")

Error:

Error in get(Info[i, 1], envir = env) : 
  lazy-load database 'C:/Users/USER/Documents/R/win-library/3.4/quantmod/R/quantmod.rdb' is corrupt
In addition: Warning message:
In get(Info[i, 1], envir = env) : internal error -3 in R_decompress1

I have deleted, reinstalled in many different ways and still the same problem.

[Solernova]

It seems as though Google is selectively blocking the getSymbols query and it is affecting the rest of the code base.

[msmith01]

Has Google completely removed financial accounts from their service altogether?

https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&tbm=fin#scso=uid_m7i2WrSfDML1Uv7jtNAK_5:0

Reveals no annual accounts for AAPL... Is it possible to change the default source from finance.google to finance.yahoo?

[joshuaulrich]

Thanks for the report. The original comment only mentioned getFinancials(), but getSymbols.google() is also no longer working. It appears Google has simply stopped providing historical prices, and the financials provided on their website are very limited. That suggests to me that functions that request data from Google should either be marked as defunct, and/or use another source.

@msmith01: I cannot change the default source from Google to Yahoo because there is no implementation that uses Yahoo as a source. I'm not inclined to work on scraping/parsing the financial data from Yahoo, so someone else would need to do it.

[joshuaulrich]

Does anyone have thoughts/opinions whether getSymbols.google() should use .Deprecated() or .Defunct() versus passing the call to getSymbols.yahoo()? Also, consider that there's no alternative data source for getFinancials(), so there's no function to pass the call to.

[ethanbsmith]

since google does not follow the same rules as yahoo on splits nor does it use the same extended symbology as yahoo, pointing .google calls to .yahoo is setting people up for subtle errors. I would just warn that the functionality is not supported and people should port to .yahoo calls. just my $.02

[msmith01]

@joshuaulrich and to others who want to download fundamental data. There was an interesting post over at Stackexchange, somebody wrote a script to collect financial data from yahoo. Heres the post.