Trouble connecting: 'We're Sorry' page - Google locking me out for a while

[timster]

I was doing a little manual research on Google and got the "We're sorry" page telling me I'm doing automated searches, with no captcha to continue.

[google.com ]

I was not clicking around like crazy, just looking at a few pages to see G was choosing snippets for their serps.

Anyone else seen this? Is Google likely to do anything else besides lock me out of searching for a while?

(BTW, I did run a scan on my computer with a tool Google suggested, just for good measure. It only found a few tracking cookies, no suspect processes.)

[tedster]

Same thing here - but only with Firefox. Sometimes on my very first search! A quick switch to a different browser still gets me the search results that need, but it does seem that false positives have become more common.

[g1smd]

For quite some time, most

site:

searches with

inurl:

operator included are very quick to be locked out.

[dstiles]

Haven't seen this as I don't often use google for serious searches now, although I used to (eg a dozen or so successive searches within a few minutes on how to fix an OS problem). Now I search for a dozen or so company or domain names a day, generally within two or three sessions.

Any idea how they effect the block - cookies or IP? If it's cookies I don't allow them from google so presumably that would not work. If it's IP then mine is fixed with two people using it, in which case google has completely lost my trade for however long it takes - and that includes a customer's froogle account and several sites in WMT, assuming they block across the board.

I can see this being a major turn-off for punters if it's maintained and not just a one-off bug. Guaranteed to send traffic to other SEs. :)

[timster]

Thanks for the responses. BTW, yes, I was using Firefox as well. In the afternoon I checked and I was able to start searching again. (Took a nice little tour of Yahoo and Bing for a while. They seemed to work OK.)