I am on my iPhone using safari. I just tried searching for something, got results then realized I needed to refine my search and added a word to the search and got sent to a page telling me that google had received too many requests from my ip and wanted to be sure I wasn’t a robot. I would have had to enter a captcha and I think my zip code to continue. I didn’t because what I was searching for wasn’t urgent and the whole thing was weird.
Is this a new google thing? Also, since I’m on an iPhone don’t I share an ip with a lot of other people through my provider and shouldn’t they know certain IPs belong to certain cell phone providers?
I’ve had to do that before. At the library where I work, for a couple days, every time we tried to do a Google search from any computer we would have to answer the captchas. It eventually went away. That was about a year ago.
I had some trouble with Google this morning (Google Reader keeps showing me the same posts, got logged out of everything Google all of a sudden, etc.) I wonder if they are having trouble with something.
Just popping back in here to say that just now, when I went to my phone (running Android on Verizon) I also had a message asking for word verification. Strange, especially since I haven’t touched my phone in two hours.
Something similar but not exactly the same happened when I googled something a few weeks ago. For years when I’ve wanted to know the meaning of a word, I put in google (using “mastodon” here for no particular reason)
define:mastodon
And then definitions of mastodon come up. But when asking google to define a word a few weeks ago, I also got the captcha thing. I asked a work colleague about it, and he thought maybe because “define” is a programming term, google was making sure I wasn’t trying to reprogram something? What? It hasn’t happened since–in fact, I just tested it, and had no problem.
My guess: Google is just getting too many queries (suspiciously too many) from a certain IP. The problem is that mobile phones from a certain provider are all proxied from a small set of IPs, so it’s easy for your queries to be affected by someone else’s bad behavior.
Depending on whether or not you’re using 3G or local WiFis, you may be on an IP address shared by a lot of users. I’m not an ISP technichian, but it would make sense for an ISP’s 3G service to reuse IP addresses when they’re released (in the 3G network). If you’re using wifi, I’d probably check the security of the network you’re on in case your local high schoolers figured out the password and are handing it around.