21 replies to this topic

[bwelford]

For the second time today, when I tried a search for a keyword phrase, I was blocked by the following message (click to enlarge).



I have no viruses or spyware on my computer so I type in the letters and get to the search results. So much for their usability. If this happens any more, I'm switching to Yahoo! as my default.

[incrediblehelp]

Are or have you run ranking reporting on that computer that your getting the error?

[kensplace]

I had that a week or so ago, when I tried to skip past the first few pages of results (as google is getting so bad on some searches I tend to find better results way down the line...)

[yannis]

Barry

I get it very regularly and is frustrating.


Yannis

[FP_Guy]

I ran into the same problem too, but I got it resolved this way.

First I did a search like this:
allintitle:"search"

And I ended up with the same message as you, then I modified it by adding a space between the colon and the first quote. It worked fine for me after that. I don't know why, but I never had to do that before.

allintitle: "search"

[bwelford]

Today is the first time it's happened to me. In both cases, I was doing a search for a possible title of a blog post as I often do. There is no change at my end. I presume that Google is getting jumpy.

This could be the start of something big. If their much vaunted rapid search results aren't rapid, why should I stay with them? On relevance, I have no reason to believe that they're any better than their competitors. I know they will knock out some websites they don't like. It's not looking good for them.

[bwelford]

Quite a few of the Sphinners are saying that Google is Broken. So far this morning I have not had a problem. Perhaps they fixed whatever had gone wrong.

[mehtaamit12]

i am often getting this result from last 2-3 month.

[AbleReach]

I sometimes see that kind of result after I've done a few searches for site:http://domain.com while using a SEO plugin that inserts more information about each site into the search results.

Closing my browser and rebooting seems to make it go away - haven't kept track exactly. Usually by the time Google gives me the "you look like a virus" warning I should have moved on to something else anyway.

It's troubling that Google seems to be giving this lock-out for site: searches when there is nothing extraordinary going on. I haven't seen that myself. Worth watching.

[bwelford]

I'm really having a lot of grief with Google this morning. For the past weeks, things had been running normally. This morning suddenly almost all Google searches I do give me the 403 message. Has anyone else noticed more Google 403 action this morning?

[Autocrat]

It's odd... I've never seen any such thing when I use a SE... maybe you use a different Google (I'm UK)... so maybe it is more of a regional issue?

[bwelford]

I don't know what it is, Autocrat. Earlier this morning I tried about 6 perfectly straightforward queries, for example 'BC Transport road conditions', 'holiday greetings', 'internet marketing', and all were 403d. Repeating them now they're all OK. I switched to Ask in consequence in my toolbar search field. I have just now completed an AVG scan of the computer and there are no viruses. It would be surprising anyway since I'm very cautious and have all sorts of firewalls and virus detection in place. All very disconcerting.

[Autocrat]

Well, aside from asking Google directly, the only idea I can form is to see what you have on your machine that those who have encountered the same issue have... and see if there is something in your browsers/system that could be causing Google to doubt you.

What is interesting is why would google want to stop automated searches?

[bwelford]

The crazy thing about all this is that I do very many Google searches day by day without any problem. Then suddenly for a period of hours I get 403d for the majority of searches. Then just as suddenly as it started, it stops and doesn't reappear for days or weeks.

[DonnaFontenot]

Barry, this has been going on for a long time. It's Google's response to what it thinks is an automated search request (such as a rank checker). It thinks you are a bot and have exceeded some limit at searching. And yes, I realize that you might have only done ONE request, but Google has been f'd up with this for a while (I'd guess about a year now, but my memory is terrible).

[bwelford]

Thanks for the explanation, Donna, but it still doesn't make sense to me. Why would it suddenly think my browser is something different from what it always is, why does it do that frequently for a period of hours and then why does it stop doing it. Strikes me their automatic bot detector needs some serious work done on it.

After all I may have a problem knowing whether they produce a more relevant result, but I certainly know when they refuse to answer me.

[Thejspot]

We have some software that pings Google for webrankings for keywords on a particular site. It's SEO Suite? Don't know if anyone uses it.

And from us doing this Google looks like it's logged our IP address or something and is forcing us to use the capture every time.

I think it is a response to this kind of software.

Don't know why Google would care unless they're planning to start charging for this kind of thing very soon and they're testing.

Of course in the meantime, they're going to lose a lot of people who HATE using captures (like me).

[saschaeh]

i been getting this randomly as well. Got me on a frenzied searching for viruses on my computer that was potentially executing queries in the background. But found nothing heard nothing. It comes and goes and i think the first time i think i had it was about 6 - 8 months back. Frustrating.

The only reason i can think of beside the point Thejspot made is that these tools and other automated query generation tools are taking up a lot of googles hardware resources and this is there way of curbing some of that usage. Now i really have no idea about google servers and so on but its a thought.

[Thejspot]

It's a bit of a worry if the Google servers are clunking out because of the volume of searches being done.

If this is the case there would be a few people biting their nails rather nervously over at Google.

[saschaeh]

yhea id also be inclined to think that there servers are uber capable.