

Subtle bug in Google can get you banned - jacquesm

I just had my IP banned from google and I couldn't understand why, after enabling the 'google toolbar'.<p>The toolbar is useful because it allows you to see the pagerank of your pages, after enabling it the browser will restart.<p>And that's where the problem will occur, if you have a large number of browser windows or tabs open when you do this (or if after a browser crash you do a recovery) google will interpret the flurry of toolbar requests when the browser comes back up as an attempt at automated requests to their servers and will block your IP accordingly.<p>Highly annoying! Effectively the use of one (luxury) google service disables the use of another one that is far more essential.<p>I hope there is a way out of 'toolbar induced google purgatory'.<p>update: I can use google again (after 15 minutes), but the toolbar still does not function.
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Matt_Cutts
There are a lot of people that scrape Google pretty badly, so we do need to
have protection against bots, including ones that look like the Google
toolbar. If you're resuming ~50 tabs, I can believe that might look like a
scraper to us for while. I'm glad you could do regular Google searches after
15 minutes or so.

~~~
jacquesm
So, are you seriously telling me that google can't tell the difference between
their _own_ toolbar used by a logged in user and a bot?

How about changing the toolbar code so it paces the requests to something that
sits below the frequency of the 'ban for bot use' trigger? That would seem to
me to be an obvious fix.

~~~
po
Bots can probably perfectly duplicate the behavior of a toolbar. Only the rate
and volume of requests would be different.

I'm assuming the toolbars can't communicate between each other. On toolbar
launch, it should pick a random number between 1 and x and wait that many ms
before contacting google. Pick x by looking at the number of req/sec that
trigger a ban and the high-end number of tabs a power user might restart with.
This would spread the requests out over that time period and keep it under the
ban.

~~~
regularfry
> Bots can probably perfectly duplicate the behavior of a toolbar. Only the
> rate and volume of requests would be different.

If they do, isn't that precisely what Google would want? Isn't it only the
rate and volume of requests that are a problem?

~~~
dmoney
They might not want someone to build a large database of pageranks.

~~~
rick_2047
ok, wouldn't that require like a very very very long time? Google has a
dadabase probably terabytes big and if someone does want it can't they do
something like what DDG does? I believe they get their searches by yahoo for
free

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momokatte
I'd report that to Google as a bug.

[http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/request.py?contact...](http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/request.py?contact_type=problem)

The official toolbar should not exceed request limits that were designed to
prevent PageRank scraping by third-party software.

~~~
jacquesm
It's now over half an hour, the toolbar _still_ doesn't function.

"We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect
our users, we can't process your request right now."

Right...

I'll try to file a bug with them, but my experience with google and support
issues so far does not lead me to believe that anybody will actually read the
report.

"I know this form is used to track new issues so I won't receive a response"

Does not give me great hope.

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lnanek
Reminds me of how I used to get banned from reading Google Groups all the time
just for opening a bunch of threads in tabs from Google Reader. Now I know
that I have to open a couple, read a couple, go back to Reader and repeat.
Kind of a shame that people have to act differently just to not be banned as
robots.

~~~
smokey_the_bear
Yeah, I usually need help to do Google's captchas too. Amazingly hard to
convince them you're human.

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gregable
Generally when this type of thing happens, Google will reply with a captcha
that, if you correctly solve it, will let you keep going for a while. I guess
toolbar requests might be a little different than web requests.

~~~
jacquesm
No captcha to be seen, the IP ban is still in place, it's now 8 hours later.

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kogir
Enabling instant search in Chrome did this for me. Pretty sad really.

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kranner
OP, any chance you could say how many total tabs+windows you had open? That
should be useful while this bug is open.

Thanks for the tip!

~~~
jacquesm
About 50 in all. And I'm on a 10 Mbit link, possibly on a slower link it would
not have triggered. More than an hour has passed now, I think I'll give up for
the day (3:50 am here anyway) and hope that by tomorrow things will have
normalized.

What a silly situation to be in.

I could change my IP by calling my provider but it is also entered in a fairly
large number of ACLs that will not be updated automatically.

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darrenkopp
same thing happened to me with auto pagerize extension while incrementally
refining my search because none of the results i was getting back were
meaningful. i moved to duck duck go and bing. if they don't want me to use
them for search, then fine. plenty of alternatives. haven't missed google so
far.

------
known
Somebody from <http://geotool.flagfox.net/?search=82.128.1.251> hacked into my
Gmail a/c

