[LINK] NSW Ombudsman Website Search powered and blocked by Google

[Scott Howard]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Bernard Robertson-Dunn <brd at iimetro.com.au
> wrote:

> > This has nothing to do with the site the search is on, and everything to
> do
> > with your computer, or one that you're sharing a public IP address with.
> >
>
> This surprises me. I tried it via my laptop and a Three 3G dongle and
> got the error message. I then tried it via a government desktop machine
> and got exactly the same error message.
>

Interesting - looks like this is indeed a different case to the normal
"sorry" page.

It would appear that Google has basically deprecated the
www.google.com/custom URL, but without telling anyone! Even going to that
URL manually and doing a search results in the Sorry page coming up.

In theory this wouldn't matter, as the search box is supposed to be done
using Javascript which would have automatically picked up the change in
name - however it looks like this site simply has hard-coded the URL, which
is what's causing the problem.

The custom search URL has been abused in the past, but simply redirecting
it to the Sorry page regardless of the situations seems a little extreme,
even for Google...

  Scott.