I was considering installing XP today on a new drive I picked up last week (a vast expanse of 500 gigabytes woohoo) when it occurred to me that the next service pack for XP is due out soon. Wanting to save some time since it can typically take an hour or so to install a service pack I went to google and searched for “windows sp3 status” whereupoon I get a “We’re sorry” page, apparently this is similar to automated requests from virus or spyware. This took me by surprise, just what is the spyware looking for here? This seems like a pretty generic query to me. Turns out I just need to remove the status term and it works but if I simply search “windows status” it works.
It gets even stranger, apparently the problem only occurs when I search from the firefox specific page, kind of wonder what is going on here. And I just tried it again and the query worked, perhaps google figured out I am not spyware or something, whatever it is they are doing something interesting here.