Yes that’s right, google search is using image verification to verify if a human searcher is searching for a particular search term. yogeshsarkar.com/blog/2007/03/13/google-search-using-image-verification-to-verify-searchers
I saw this a few days ago but only after I was checking datacenters a bit too fast. Seems my IP got flagged for abuse. It's gone now.
well i wasnt doing anything like that, it was a simple search that i was doing and it wasnt like i was searching a lot before it. in fact i got this error second time when i used ie with google toolbar (first i had used ff and entered the verification letters)
Wow... I never heard of this before... It would suck if they made this for anybody who access there site.
It's not new, been around for a while, and yes it happens when you search too much or use automated rank checking software (which is against Google's TOS, btw ). Since last month it has been quirky on and off, showing for apparently no reason. I've had it happen to me on occasion when jumping from page 1 to page 10, to see how deep the results actually showed, and someone else brought it up last month at SEORefugee: http://www.seorefugee.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4979 I don't know the cause, but were you searching from a proxy by any chance? Or on a network at work? Could there have been a large number of searches from the same IP block? Also, did the captcha actually work? When I was getting the message erroneously, no amount of filling in that damn image box gave me back the results, but I could perform other searches. Before, when it would get triggered legitimately from my machine, all searches were blocked for a couple of hours after that, only recourse was to get a new IP (which is a pain with my ISP, the leases run for days). -Michael
It could be due to SEO for firefox plugin that I am using, it did work. Once I I filled the captcha it must have set a cookie and it didn't happen in firefox again but happened in IE when I tried.
After I searched similar kewords several times in a day , it appeared image verification . Very inconvenient .
no idea, never thought of tracking it. It did happen again though, but this time there was no image verification, simply an error page telling me to run the search after some time.
This is one of those good ideas with significant unintended consequences. Few people need to search Google badly enough to struggle with captchas and IP blocks. There are plenty of equally good search engines which do not try to interfere with their usefulness. If I encounter this problem at Google I will not watste much time switching to another search engine. I am sure many others will do the same thing. Internet time is very compressed. A year in the life of a brick and mortar business on main street happens in 30 days or less on the net.