Ask HN: Google refuses to work due to 'unusual data traffic'

4 points by darklajid 13y ago ↗ HN

So a friend of mine works for a European newspaper, lives in Tel Aviv and covers the recent events, including visits to Gaza.

Google started to refuse her search requests with this aforementioned message today. Now I'm interested (and this place has quite a high number of Googlers): Is this a weird 'don't search for bombs and rocket terms' kind of terrorist protection gone wrong? Something else? Not any message Google returns ever, likely being related to network services on site or that particular machine?

Seems quite an odd message and.. scary.

2 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 14.1 ms ] thread

capo 13y ago ↗

According to the help forums similar error messages used to appear for those who had the toolbar installed (false positives detecting queries originating from non-humans).

Have your friend preform searches on the encrypted site and report back: https://encrypted.google.com

codeonfire 13y ago ↗

When googling from within a corporate intranet it can appear to Google to be a large amount of traffic from a single source IP. This is probably what the message is about.