Has Google ever told you that you were searching too much?

Question

This is a new one on me. Admittedly, with working on my Civil War project I'm doing a lot of Googling--names, regiments, battles--in addition to the back and forth I have to do at familysearch to figure out who/where these guys are. But Google actually stopped me from searching today to ask if I was a robot. Is this a new thing? Has it happened to you?

robotically yours,

W

Comments

I once looked at too many recipes on one site and got kicked off for 24 hours, weird huh?

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it's like being told you're too good a cook! :D I do start to think of Google as this infinite free resource and of course it's neither. And like most of us here, I remember pre-Google days, and pre-internet days. It's strange how quickly I've come to assume it's a right to be able to Google. But I told them I wasn't a robot and they let me keep on. I'm done for the day, though, so the Googlebots can relax about me.

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That is too funny. I find I get better results with Yahoo! anyway.

Answer 1

Wow sound wicked I never experience that and I don’t hold back when it comes to google I hope you will get it back

Comments

they just made me say I wasn't a bot, and I had it right back. But it was a strange moment!

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I was looking at google and I use google chrom do you use that it is free too,

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 Well, it's due to the fuss made since the 2016 General Election and ibots. ibots became or were exposed as "a big problem" infesting and infecting the Media. There's already prep for the 2020 General Election. 

Answer 2

Recently cousin Harvey Abbott was emailing me a lot of census records, wills, indexes, etc.  Maybe 20 emails a day.  On the fourth or fifth day, Google cut him off and gave him first a 24 hour suspension and then one week when he picked up again.

Comments

That’s nutz!

Answer 3

They always set the thresholds too low.  A bot wouldn't get out of bed for the amount of data you could use.

Comments

I like the notion that bots have beds. Maybe some mornings they get up on the wrong side of them.

Answer 4

This is to try and prevent Identity Theft. It is easier to assume the identity of the dead then the living.

ID thieves use bots to collect the information they need to become someone they are not. So this is not new to Google, just new to the rest of us.

Comments

aha. Makes sense, even if I was looking in the middle of the 19th century when a person could simply change identity by taking a train 100 miles away and picking a new name.

Answer 5

I've had it happen several times recently when using the Google News Archive to look up old obituaries in the local newspaper!  It didn't give me an option to prove I wasn't a robot just cut me off.