Google Spam Filter?
I've never seen this before. I did a search on the word "triumverate" and got this.
Musings of a VC in NYC
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Apparently a lot of people have encountered this but there is no explanation...
Posted by: Zoli Erdos | February 17, 2007 at 11:28 AM
I'm guessing that since Google canned their search API, people are now just screen scraping. And this is their (imperfect) attempt at stopping this.
Posted by: josh | February 17, 2007 at 03:08 PM
Here in the UK. The first two google results take you to wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Triumvirate - 25k - 16 Feb 2007 -
Posted by: Geoff | February 17, 2007 at 04:23 PM
C'mon you can't just leave us hanging...
What bizarre set of circumstances led you to be searching for "triumverate"?
Are you on a Roman history kick?
Posted by: Erik Schwartz | February 17, 2007 at 04:57 PM
In a brief stroke of irony, I just searched that same term yesterday and again earlier today, due to my unhealthy habits of watching the HBO series Rome. I ran into no such issues. Though, an interesting dilemma none the less.
Posted by: Jamie | February 17, 2007 at 05:21 PM
hi, I've gotten this many times, I sometimes pound Google really hard and very iteratively (slight variants on the query), and I do think they have some kind of mechanism to filter out automated queries.
BTW, it's "triumvirate", not "triumverate". So maybe it's a spelling filter? ;-)
Posted by: Holley | February 17, 2007 at 06:07 PM
Here's a theory..
The word "triumverate" was used in yesterday's post on music. I looked up the word to get a definition. It's possible that many people took this same action -- I habitually google for words to get their definitions. Perhaps google has a system that detects a statistical rise in querying and then flags this as potential query automation. There could be a geographical component in here, as josh pointed out, you get different results from different parts of the globe. Tie this in with A VC's daily reach, the international and tech savvy profile of the readers and finally the low number of results for that query (implies infrequent querying) and we could be on to something.
The interesting question is if google is protecting itself from reverse engineering - the possibility of profiling query results to better understand the search model.
Thoughts?
Chris.
Posted by: Chris | February 18, 2007 at 06:50 AM
11:39 a.m. EST, USA. I googled it and got regular search results back.
hmmm.
Posted by: BarbaraM | February 18, 2007 at 11:43 AM
We've encountered the same thing a few times at Lijit with our Google-coop integration, usually after heavy testing. Seems to be a combination of high volume and/or repeated making the same query. If lots of people on your IP address (behind your router) were also searching for the same term, that could trigger it.
Posted by: Stan James | February 18, 2007 at 08:08 PM
Google probably figured the only person in the world that would google that word had to be a computer. Most people search "britney hair cut" or "paris hilton's junk"
Posted by: Shane | February 19, 2007 at 02:39 PM
Hey Fred. Love your post. A successful query on triumverate, at least in Canada, regardless of the spelling, should have returned "The Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Saunders before he went t*ts up. Oh, I hate the colonel and his wee beedy eyes."
Posted by: Joe Timlin | February 22, 2007 at 03:58 PM