1. Is there some inside joke at Google about not updating their 404s, 403s and other error pages to the new millennium? Maybe it's a corporate badge of honor, like Billy Gates' $4 haircuts?
2. Here is the nefarious query that brought the mighty G's wrath upon me.
What's wrong with this search? It's not like it includes script tags or invokes some gawd-awful union of sorts that is going to melt one of their pizza boxes. Plus, the request is from their own IE toolbar, which (assuming there are anti-goog infected zombies laying about) would presumably be the easiest mechanism to track and shut out questionable query structures in the first place.
Maybe it's because I clicked on the dreaded "last page" of results and sent a longest-of-long tail indexes spinning into the abyss?
3. What did they mean by "restore my access as quickly as possible"? When I saw the page, I thought I'd been placed in some kind of IP-purgatory and wouldn't be able to search for at least several minutes. However, I immediately returned to the pattern and was able to continue searching for several pages (until I got the warning again, at which point I gave up).
I swear, it's times like these that make me want to switch to the competition. I might even make tthat switch tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then next week. Yeah, definitely next week. :-|