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Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

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Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#1

Post by jacquesm »

I just had my IP banned from google and I couldn't understand why, after enabling the 'google toolbar'.

The toolbar is useful because it allows you to see the pagerank of your pages, after enabling it the browser will restart.

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.

Highly annoying! Effectively the use of one (luxury) google service disables the use of another one that is far more essential.

I hope there is a way out of 'toolbar induced google purgatory'.

update: I can use google again (after 15 minutes), but the toolbar still does not function.

Re: Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#3

Post by jacquesm »

momokatte wrote: post #2

I'd report that to Google as a bug. http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/request.py?contact... The official toolbar should not exceed request limits that were designed to prevent PageRank scraping by third-party software.

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.

Re: Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#5

Post by jacquesm »

kranner wrote: post #4

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!

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.

Re: Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#6

Post by 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.

Re: Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#7

Post by smokey_the_bear »

lnanek wrote: post #6

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.

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

Re: Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#8

Post by 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.

Re: Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#9

Post by jacquesm »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: Subtle bug in Google can get you banned

#10

Post by po »

jacquesm wrote: post #9
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #8

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.

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.

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.

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