Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
"We're sorry...
... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.
We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.
"
Because it's obvious what is happening. The Googleplex is rejecting searches that match the pattern coming from the owned machines. That does two things: speeds up the Googleplex, and gives some measure of protection to the forums that were being attacked. And it doesn't hurt real surfers.
Whether it hurts Googlemancers is ... not a consideration.
I appreciate the problem, it's happened before, it'll happen again. But real searchers are getting the error message which message is not just restricted to php type queries typical of webmasters. My wife's just complained because she couldn't get to a forum she's forgotten the URL for. Trust me, she's real :). But, more crucially, she thinks she's got a virus on her machine. Google said so.
Google can't tell whether you really have the problem or not, but to them you are sending the same request as people that ARE known to have that problem - hence it takes the same action.
That's the not very smart part. There is a good word for when you're not 100% sure about something: may. As in "There may be a virus on your computer". Wordtracker says that the word "forum" is searched for over 10,000 times a day. Imagine how many times it's searched for in Google. Add that to the all the searches for all the other stop words. How many million people did Google alarm unnecessarily by stating as a matter of fact that their computers were infected?
<edited to delete a word repetition>
[edited by: oddsod at 5:30 pm (utc) on Dec. 21, 2005]
I think that if you can't get any joy searching on google try some other search engine that doesn't wind you up so much (Meant in the nicest possible way & not at all badly). Let's face it ... google's only one of hundreds of search engines out there and not even that good since they banned my site ;-)
All the best
Colin
Google can't tell whether you really have the problem or not, but to them you are sending the same request as people that ARE known to have that problem - hence it takes the same action.
Gee, I'm glad they don't do anything more drastic, like report the person to the federal authorities or something. :)
The word "forum" isn't the important part of the search itself, but rather the whole URL query string that your browser is sending, including all the hl and num and filter and meta etc parameters that are also included.
It's like the medieval times. She drowned, so she must be innocent.
