5 replies to this topic

[EdgabtheGreat]

This happened to me the other day, because our company sits behind a proxy server all the searches done on google are coming from one IP address. Google picks up on this and assumes you're a bot so it limits access by asking for you to type out letters given in an image (To prove you are not a bot).

This is quite a huge issue as it is affecting alot of companies.

Check out this blog and see how many customers Google is losing because of this.
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2...ry-message.html

It only takes a few hours for the ban to lift but can you imagine how many support calls I got in those few hours.

If this is going to happen more often I will go insane, maybe its worth changing to Yahoo???

[iXeta]

I can see how this would be extremely annoying, but it sounds necessary.
People pay companies to repeatedly search for certain terms and use google
in ways to raise their pagerank. In order to stop this, google has smart code
to keep the pagerank companies from abusing google's ranking system.

[Bluebear]

When I use the Google translator at school it sometimes asks me to type in some letters due to that they think I am a robot or something like that. Sure it is annoying, but if it is necessary it should not be a huge problem. For example some people complain when they have to type in letters in some box before adding a comment on some random blog. (Nothing to do with Google.) Though if it keeps the bots and spammers away: what is wrong with that?

The same thing happened to me at Facebook, though I stopped searching for stuff when I got a note they would block my account if I continued doing it.

Edited by Bluebear, 22 October 2008 - 04:09 PM.

[shadowx]

Never encountered this before, but it does seem silly, perhaps if they asked people to register with a business account or something in which they have to provide full contact details or something and then use cookies to limit it per PC and not per IP. It does make sense though, like said google is a massive target and i expect if you made a botnet of 10,000 computers (easily done with a trojan) and had each of those computers query google at an insane speed you could really affect performance. And then consider that you could theoritcally have 10 times that number of computers.. It wouldnt look preety!

[rpgsearcherz]

I thought searches had nothing to do with google pagerank though, and it was based only on how many sites are linked back to you. That's what I came up with during all of my research.

So what is the point in limiting the searches? To keep their server load lower?

[ihost]

Hello!

Thanks for the information! I really didn't knew about this at all =D... Personally, I am often using Google for different scientific researches and other random things too, but never get banned yet. Also, I have a DSL internet, so anytime I re branch it, my IP address changes so this might be the reason (since I am re branching it really really often ).

On the other hand, I agree with you guys who say that it is necessary; many peoples can just make automatic bots and spam search it, which can create a congestion in the search process. This still has never happened to me, because pages always opens pretty fast, but this website is always growing with time, so might become a problem in future.

Tim.