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Comment by nicksergeant | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting, so I tried the search at http://yandex.com. I tried a few searches. Eventually I got:

http://i.imgur.com/Q7C0rRd.png

This is not a good user experience. You immediately assume I'm doing something bad / wrong because I did about 4 searches within 20 seconds?

So I read http://i.imgur.com/NITisTs.png

- There are no other users on my network. - I made 4 search requests inside of 20 seconds. - I have no plugins that are performing search requests on my behalf. - I'm fairly certain my computer is not infected with a virus (I'm on OS X, and even have ClamXav running).

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Google does that too for unusual (yet correct) requests. Try googling this:

    he is "100000000..900000000" years old

ahh, interesting.

It looks like that happens because the system that expands ranges into multiple queries is in front of the system that detects and blocks rapid clustered queries, so the query you entered looks is an enormous flood of queries in a very short time by the time it reeaches the abuse detection system.

Given the effect it would seem to have on load to execute queries of that magnitude, its not entirely unreasonable behavior although it would be better UX if the error returned distinguished the problem more clearly.

Google also does this if you proxy your requests through a cloud IP space. I proxy my Google searches through rackspace IPs and I was given a CAPTCHA on nearly every search.

I actually stopped using Google because of this (and privacy/creepiness issues). I switched to Bing. I have to say, Bing has gotten really good. When others saw me using it, they started using it too. Most of my office has switched now and people have stopped saying "google it" and started saying "bing it".

Clicky: https://www.google.com/search?q=he%20is%20"100000000..900000...

You IP might be the reason: Yandex in Russia-centric, so any outside requests seems weird to them.

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