Abuse from a Google IP range

[Mokita]

I know this is not quite on-topic for this forum - but am not sure where to post it.

For quite a while I had been noticing someone taking pages here and there - always by stealth, using (what I assume are) proxies in Google's 74.125.0.0/16 range.

The requests are patently fake - although I won't go into detail about that here. And as I can't really block that range (Google do use it themselves), I picked a feature of the requests and blocked that - effectively.

All was fine until today, when whoever/whatever it is, went ballistic, and flooded our server with 760 requests in less than 4 minutes.

I feel that this sort of abuse is worthy of a complaint to Google, but I can't find any mechanism for doing so.

Does any one know if you can report abuse like this, and is there any chance that Google will listen or act?

[incrediBILL]

Google has been making screen shots for quite some time now.

If it's that special version of the browser they use, it's them.

[Mokita]

Hi Bill,

No, it is definitely not "Google Web Preview". As I said in my OP, this bot has several hallmarks that scream "Fake".

BTW, it was I who first reported GWP in this forum, so I am very aware of it and what it is:
[webmasterworld.com...]

I see GWP in all my sites regularly and have no problems with it (except the obvious copyright issues and effect on click throughs). It has never requested the same html file without any supporting files, multiple times in a row, and it visits only intermittently.

This bot asked for exactly the same file 760 times in a row within 4 minutes, and not all from exactly the same IP. But the vast majority of requests came from just one IP with no rDNS.

A small number of them resolve to "postnews1.google.com" and "postnews2.google.com".

So, going back to my original question, can anyone tell me how to report abuse of this nature to Google?

In case it matters, I don't necessarily think it is Google doing this. I am just hoping they can home in on the real culprit. I'm thinking it might be like Google Transcoder etc.

[dstiles]

I don't have any googlebots listed for that IP range but I do have a lot of what I term "google utils" - things like GWP, Translate and other proxies. Because of my customers I permit SOME of the utils - eg Translate - whilst blocking others.

I have two ranges banned for high speed "scraping" within the range:
74.125.154.80 - 74.125.154.89
74.125.158.80 - 74.125.158.89