How ironic that after writing this post about automatic queries, I should be the one to get penalized for supposedly sending automatic queries.
All I was doing was manually typing in some keyword searches, and bam! I got the screenshot you see below. The restriction lasted for about 20 minutes and now it works again, but not after seriously interrupting my work and making me wonder if it was going to take hours, days, or weeks to sort out. I guess the way I was typing in my searches must have coincided perfectly with some algorithm they have for detecting automatic queries. Well Google, I guess you have a ways to go.
Yeah, I get the same thing. I figured out that if I actually click a link from the search results every once in a while, they no longer take me as a bot.
I wonder if simply clearing your cache is enough to reset the counter. I also wonder if being logged into Google at the time would solve the problem. After all, it’s less likely for a bot to have a gmail address, I would think.