A Google Web Search Help thread has a school administrator posting that Google Scholar is now no longer working from within the university.
Why is it not working? Google is blocking them because it appears that automated searches are being done from the campus. The truth is, there is thousands of students and when the students conduct searches, it all comes from the same IP address. Google is assuming it is the same computer but in reality, it is different computers from different searchers.
The school administrator said:
In our university Internet runs behind campus-wide proxy. So internet ip of each and ever computer running on the campus is same as proxy ip. Recently Google scholar has started blocking our search queries based on the fact that it is getting a lot of queries via our particular ip. It is obvious that at a time is 1500 people are accessing Google scholar then it will get high number of hits but it becomes annoying to enter captcha every time we search.
Technically, I guess Google can whitelist the IP address but will that happen?
Googler Courtney said:
Thanks for the information. I've reached out to the Scholar team about this issue. I can't promise they'll have an easy fix for your campuses, but hopefully they'll be able to look into the issue!
Time will tell.
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.