#60 web search reloads constantly, leads to "We're sorry" pages

[mll]

when i do a google search, most of the time the page keeps reloading itself. while doing so, it floods google with requestst, which eventually temporarily bans me and diplays stuff like :

******* begin paste *******
We're sorry...

... but it appears your computer is sending automated requests.
[-] More Information

This page appears when our systems detect procedural requests coming from your IP address in violation of our Terms of Service. This block will expire after the procedural requests have stopped.

Automated requests may be sent by malware or a bad browser plugin on your machine. If you are using a shared network connection, the traffic may be coming from a different computer behind the same IP address. It is also possible someone is intentionally sending automated requests using a script. Your proxy administrator may be able to identify the responsible machine.

If you are a network administrator and you need help identifying the procedural requests in your logs, more information is available in our Help Center.
Your IP: [edited]
Time: 2010-09-01T08:21:26Z
URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=&cat=&meta=&num=&ie=utf-8&q=\[edited]
******* end paste *******

Note that I'm not the only one : RaXelliX reported it on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498/reviews/

[Phoglenix]

May be related to ID: 2948948. Rather big worry. Need to fix >.<

[Anonymous]

this all started after "instant google: debuted. I have it turned off, but that doesn't solve the problem. i cant use google at all for the past 30 min, even after doing the google CAPTCHA. needless to say, I disabled optimize google.

[Morac]

I've been hit by this on two occasions. I believe it's an incompatibility between "Streaming search results" and the new Google web page. Sometimes OptimizeGoogle goes into a fetch loop which Google interprets as an automated search (which technically it is).

Disabling streaming should work around this.

Last time I got hit by this, I got things working by clearing out my Google.com cookies.

This needs to be corrected though since it's resulting in being getting banned from Google.

[Anonymous]

I've found the case, it's something under Sticky Google Preferences. I've disabled it altogether and Google Search/Images stopped looping.