Whatever You Do…Don’t Search For “ASCII Mr. Burns” Or Google Will Flip Out

by Paul Sherman on September 12, 2011 · 2 comments

Really Google? I’m on my home network. No one else is using my connection, according to my outbound connection monitoring software.

Nothing but little ol’ me on Firefox.

Kevin Peno

I just tried the same and it worked fine? I apologize if I’m missing something.
Justin

It has little to do with that actually query (“ASCII Mr. Burns”). Basically, Google has an automated system that tries to detect automated scanning/attacks/etc. For instance, Google has a useful calculator feature (you can type in “(2 mm)*sin(30 degrees) in cm” and it will tell you the answer (with proper unit conversion). But if you do many searches like this in a row, it will throw up errors like that. Reason being that the kind of search is strange (searching for strange mixtures of characters is one way to find vulnerabilities in websites), and obviously searching in rapid succession is similar to what an automated script would do.

Point being, it’s nothing to be too alarmed over. Probably your research search history was inordinately rapid or otherwise atypical.