Google, partially down...

at this time, on some searches, you get this error:

 

lol that sucks. ;-) interesting find.

 

i've seen that too! it happened while was using a certain piece of software.

 

That, as I recall, has been there since the Brazilian phpBB hacker worms ("Santy") hit over Christmas 2004. Google was being used to identify vulnerable phpBB forums to infect and Google took action to deny the search queries.

Note the search query in that link is:

Out of curiosity, why were you trying to do this search, Jorge?

 

I was thinking the exact same thing... the only reason people run that search query is to find phpbb boards to exploit... shady practice...

 

really? i did not know
i was trying to get the number of forums using version 2 of phpbb

 

hmmm.... you are going to find many who find that hard to believe.

 

ohh i won't be able to sleep now, with all those nightmares of people thinking that way...

nah... honestly, it has to do with a new project related with phpbb, i wanted to know my audience.

 

Well, you're going to have trouble searching with that query with the major search engines. After Google banned the query, the Brazilian jerks brought out a variant of Santy which used Yahoo, so Yahoo followed suit in banning the query. I would imagine that other search engines followed suit, though I admit I haven't tried them.