South Jersey Comcast Customers Temporarily Blocked Out of Google
Martin O'Donnell pointed out a story on CNET News.com that says Google recently blocked a small IP-address range belonging to Comcast customers from using its popular search engine. The reason that Google took this action is that someone was violating its terms of service by running automated queries. We have to assume that the automated queries were being run through the main (HTML) search interface.
The article points out that responding to automated queries is resource intensive for the search engine companies. How much less resource intensive is it if people use the new Google Web API to do essentially the same thing?
IP Address Range blocking is fairly common in abuse situations, and we think that Google was within their rights to do what they did. But, what would the Comcast customers do if Comcast could not stop the activity to which Google objected?