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Went Hot: December 18, 2007 - 11:01 pm
Posted By: theGypsy 263 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://mashable.com)
Category: Google Searching
Mashable - We’re not sure on the common thread here, but we’re receiving multiple reports of serious issues for Google users of the search service. On Twitter, both @laughingsquid and @jabancroft both first alerted us to the issue, and was later followed up by an emailed blog posting from Zoli Erdos:
Just about every 3rd Google search I make tonight results in the message below:
"We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now."
14 Comments
Comments
Add "Googlebot" or another crawler name to your user agent string and you get exactly that.
Actually, Sebastion, no, I just verified that won't cause it.
This has happened before multiple times, it has to do with network activity, not user agents.
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/07/reason-behind-were-sorry-message.html is where Google has covered why this sometimes happens and what to do about it.
Danny, they explain about when you get the message normally, but never responded to the concerns that happen when it starts getting displayed widespread, like it appears to have done yesterday, for no apparent reason at all.
You can tell from the comments that it was happening to people who would be able to tell if it were a worm or automated software causing the problem. I've seen it as well happen for no reason. Sometimes it will trigger just by jumping to the last page of the serps when you have your results set to 100 per page, without clicking on pages 2-9 in between. No reason at all the filter should be that sensitive.
Well, I just signed off my Google acct, set UA to Googlebot and Referrer/cookies/JS to Off, did a site: query and got the sorry page when clicking on the next link. Of course that doesn't mean that everybody gets that.
Yep, a click on the last SERP and num=100 (+ filter=0) quite often produces that behavior, regardless the UA ...
I got the message twice yesterday on very routine queries. There was no reason whatsoever for this to occur. The title is 100% accurate.
You nearly always get that message for page 3 onwards for any query that includes both site: and inurl: within. I only ever search with &num=100 included.
I also got it a few times earlier today for some totally innocuous queries.
I've gotten these results when using Aaron Wall's SEO plugin a lot (is that what you're linking to Danny? too late/tired to check...). I think this filter goes off when people do queries that are similar to what bots/scrapers do, and especially if they're using up lots of server resources.
But if it happens on innocuous queries, with the plugin turned off (and others like SEO Quake also off) then IDK. Probably a screwup in rolling out some anti-spam.
Actually that`s not a bug, it`s a feature. When I try searching Google from certain (misused) IPs, I get the same message. No matter if I make site requests or just general searching.
it's been happening to me off and on for the past month and a half to two months. it's nothing drastic, but i'd be locked out of google for about 5 hours. i ran all sorts of anti-virus, anti-spyware and whatever else i could think of.
i got hit when i was doing keyword research for a client cus they wanted to know where some terms placed. is doing placement research going to be a problem now? i read that link, now and once when it was first happening, and i don't feel that as a human i'm some over aggressive seo ranking tools...
...i know placement doesn't mean everything but placement along with traffic and conversions matter to some clients, i really don't need google thinking i'm spyware when i'm trying to do my job.
Automated queries (scraping, or an infected machine) can trigger this message. And as Danny points out, we've talked about this before: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/07/reason-behind-were-sorry-message.html
But Matt, so do non automated uninfected machines. Read through the comments in that post, and in other locations. That post does not address the concerns of most of the people commenting in it.
It appears that the bar that triggers that message does not sit at a fixed height, and at times appears to be set way too low, triggering on some of the most innocuous queries.