I know I don’t use Google for search that much – like once every couple of weeks – but when did they start requiring CAPTCHA checks for searches?

Someone left me a comment that they were looking for other web sites that had complained about CSS. Specifically s/he did a search for CSS Sucks and my site came up. No surprise there, seeing as my 2005 post called CSS Sucks Bollocks has been pinged by a number of people over the years, but the question I had was exactly how high in the Search Engine Results Food Chain was I?

I started with Windows Live Search, since that’s the search engine I use most often – there I’m ranked second – but I figured I should check Google as well, considering their current market share – there I’m ranked third.

Getting the search results from Google wasn’t that straightforward though… I did search for CSS Sucks and I was met with this page from http://sorry.google.com saying “We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. […] To continue searching, please type the characters you see below.”

Uh, really?