Over the last 24 hours, the IBP (Internet Business Promoter) Keyword Ranking component of my software hasn't been delivering consistent data. On many of the checks it says "Search engine returned no results...", however I know this is wrong. Does anyone know if Google is cracking down people who rank their keywords/pages each day? Does anyone have a good alternative (possibly online solution that costs little and doesn't require any plugins, etc)?
have you check with IBP? Sometimes it happen as google only allowed certain number of check allowed per IP. You might want to change your IP and try again.
Dont check more than 100 keyword in one hours. This will limit your search capability. Google is very smart made for human , not for automated software
Perhaps it is a mistake of your keyword ranking tool. Of course, in order to avoid being banned by Google, you'd better avoid researching too many keywords per day.
If you take a look at the Google guidelines published for the webmasters, you would find some notes telling why Google does not like some types of software that get connected to its databases. Keyword ranking tools or backlinks checkers could be among these types of utilities. Doing a manual checking could be the best thing all the time.