Google’s “We’re Sorry” Message

Google, on its security blog site, explains that message “We’re Sorry.’ For some who may have experienced this message, here is what Google says:

Some of you might have seen this message while searching on Google, and wondered what the reason behind it might be. Instead of search results, Google displays the “We’re sorry” message when we detect anomalous queries from your network. As a regular user, it is possible to answer a CAPTCHA - a reverse Turing test meant to establish that we are talking to a human user - and to continue searching. However, automated processes such as worms would have a much harder time solving the CAPTCHA. Several things can trigger the sorry message. Often it’s due to infected computers or DSL routers that proxy search traffic through your network - this may be at home or even at a workplace where one or more computers might be infected. Overly aggressive SEO ranking tools may trigger this message, too. In other cases, we have seen self-propagating worms that use Google search to identify vulnerable Web servers on the Internet and then exploit them. The exploited systems in turn then search Google for more vulnerable Web servers and so on. This can lead to a noticeable increase in search queries and sorry is one of our mechanisms to deal with this.

FWIW - CAPTCHA is a type of responding test used in computing to determine whether the user is human or not. Normally we see this on Web sites where we are required to type in some letters or numbers before the information is accepted.

Full details here.

[tags]google, message, captcha[/tags]