Google Says, 'Sorry, You Search Like A Bot'

Lately my attempts to visit my blog have been foiled by a 403 Forbidden error message from Google! Neither can I run a Google search!!!!. Can you believe it? Google, the giga-powerful near-deity of the web, hindering my surfing? Fortunately, I am using Windows Live Writer to blog, so I can publish this.

I am just a home user who has been Googling without incidents for more than a decade. All of a sudden, here it goes. I was on this morning, and then late in the evening, without having done anything to induce a spyware in my laptop, I have been hit.  Now I realize more than ever just how critical Google is in my life.

This is what it says:

We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't  process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

I have an every day updated AntiVirus / Internet Security program installed on my laptop, and my full system scan reported that my laptop is not infected with any malware just this morning. Just to make sure that my laptop is not infected, I re-ran a comprehensive full system scan over-night, and no risks were detected other than a tracking cookie. So, definitely that's not the cause of this bugging message. Nor are my searches so frequent as to seem automated. I tried deleting my Google cookies but that did not help. Another laptop used by my wife on the same Internet connection, with the same public IP address, has no trouble.

It certainly doesn't make me want to let Google host any of my data, as they seem so rabidly eager to do (off late, I have been thinking of hosting my blog using Google Custom domains). It doesn't inspire confidence!

I decided to do some Google Search on the problem from the other laptop and this is what I found :

This usually happens because our system detects automated querying (which is against our Terms of Service: http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html) coming from your network's IP address. Here are some examples of what's considered automated querying:

- using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries
- "meta-searching" Google
- performing "offline" searches on Google

There's a good chance someone in your network is violating our ToS. If you identify this user and he/she gets rid of the program, the ban on your IP address will automatically be lifted.

I also found that unfortunately this problem can happen if you have a proxy server with a large amount of traffic as well (may be my ISP makes use of a proxy? for netboost purposes?).  Anyway's, within the last couple of days, something seems to have changed at Google to see proxy servers / net boosters as "evil" automated bots. 

Google : There are thousands of users out there in the web space, who are experiencing the same problem. Please fix it from your end OR @least tell us how we can have it fixed from our end.