Home PC banned from Teoma

[rnewton01]

Hi,

I am unable to search at teoma from my home PC. I sent them an email and got this response:

<paraphrased by Woz

Teoma said block the address because of high robot activity from the IP. Sorry, cannot unblock due to IP history.

/paraphrased by Woz>

What do they mean by "robot" traffic? I have only used them to search and to check inurl:mysite.com for indexed pages on my websites.

Is there a way to get off their banned list?

Any help would be appreciated.

Rob

[edited by: Woz at 2:06 am (utc) on May 30, 2004]
[edit reason] Paraphrased per TOS#9 [/edit]

[rogerd]

Rob, if you were using a program like WPG or similar to check your rankings, that's the problem. Use of automated searching tools violates the TOS of most search engines.

If you were just searching manually, it's hard to imagine that they misidentified you as a bot, unless you had an extremely large number of searches in a short time.

At this point, your best bet is to ask to be unblocked and swear you won't ever do whatever you did again.

[Macguru]

>>from my home PC

Depending of which type of connection you have, resetting your modem can change your IP.

It could help.

[CompressedAir]

You might want to check your 'hosts' file for anything that might have ended up in there: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
If you need a new ip, an unplug of your modem and a release ip/renew ip should get you a new one, unless you have a static ip.

[rnewton01]

I don't own WPG or anything similar. I had to search on google to even find out what WPG was and what an automated query was.

I'll try to unplug my modem to see if I can get set to another IP.

Thanks for the help.

Rob

[upside]

rnewton01, you could try using an anonymous proxy. Teoma would see the IP address of the proxy rather than your own.

[rnewton01]

I shut off my computer and unplugged my cable modem for a while and tried again.

No luck so I guess I have a static IP.

I'll give using an anonymous proxy a try.

Rob

[rnewton01]

I was able to search teoma just now with an anonymous proxy.

Thanks for the tip.

rob

[victor]

Do you have teenage kids?

(If you are not sure, check the size of your phone bill. It's a good indicator).

If so, maybe their incessant online activity has driven Teoma over the edge.

[your_store]

I got the same message from Teoma yesterday, but it would only appear when searching one two word phrase. Any other phrase I entered would bring up the normal SERPs.

Strange to say the least.