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Generally when this type of thing happens, Google will reply with a captcha that, if you correctly solve it, will let you keep going for a while. I guess toolbar requests might be a little different than web requests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Bots can probably perfectly duplicate the behavior of a toolbar. Only the rate and volume of requests would be different. If they do, isn't that precisely what Google would want? Isn't it only the rate and volume of requests that are a problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they can communicate with each other, they're extensions, not web pages. The first one could act as the 'master', and proxy all the requests. It's obvious the limiting is rate based, otherwise this would never have happened, so if it is rate based then the toolbar could pace itself to below that rate. Of course that would 'give away' the rate to observers of the toolbar during a browser restart but they cou…
Of course they can communicate with each other, they're extensions, not web pages. Firefox extensions are Javascript CSS and XUL so I don't think that's obvious. I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that they might be sand boxed and have no awareness of each other. Is it one instance of the toolbar per "page-opened" event? Is it one instance per window? What I was describing was a way to stay under the limit wi…
Multiple Mozilla extension instances are indeed able to communicate via some centralised code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bots can probably perfectly duplicate the behavior of a toolbar. Only the rate and volume of requests would be different. If they do, isn't that precisely what Google would want? Isn't it only the rate and volume of requests that are a problem?
They might not want someone to build a large database of pageranks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they can communicate with each other, they're extensions, not web pages. The first one could act as the 'master', and proxy all the requests. It's obvious the limiting is rate based, otherwise this would never have happened, so if it is rate based then the toolbar could pace itself to below that rate. Of course that would 'give away' the rate to observers of the toolbar during a browser restart but they cou…
Of course they can communicate with each other, they're extensions, not web pages. Firefox extensions are Javascript CSS and XUL so I don't think that's obvious. I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that they might be sand boxed and have no awareness of each other. Is it one instance of the toolbar per "page-opened" event? Is it one instance per window? What I was describing was a way to stay under the limit wi…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Other factors can also come into play, e.g. you could be sitting on an IP subnet where someone else has been scraping Google, or a worm has been sending automated queries to Google.
Unlikely, I'm in the sticks, most people here are old and wouldn't know a mouse from a keyboard
> or a worm has been sending automated queries to Google.
That would have to be a linux based worm then. Unless that suspected worm is sitting on another IP of course.
Do you want me to try to make it reproducible ? I'd happily spend the time if it would help to make this problem go away. I understand how hard it is to differentiate between bots and regular users, but you should be able to pick up the difference between your own toolbar in normal use situations and a bot.
And if that's not the case then either the battle is 'lost' or it might be better to simply only let the toolbar query the google servers when explicitly asked to do so.