Google locks me out, then apologises

    This morning I was probing some of the more obscure sites linking to the Oxford Dictionaries Online web site by running a Google link: query. I was paging through the results ten at a time. Very monotonous and repetitive.
    Suddenly, this happened.

    It seems I was mistaken for an automated search engine scraper, probably because I was making regular queries without clicking on any results. There's a first time for everything I guess, and I've just uncovered a Google feature. A quick clear of recent cookies, and I was back on my way.
    It's a long time since I used software to retrieve results from Google. Probably back when they still offered a SOAP API.