Are you a bot?

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Google seems to have finally decided that people are also bots: check out this post, in which it’s claimed that searching for a description of a Spam Assassin rule yielded the above response. It’s doing the rounds at digg right now.

I just posted about this on Seamus McCauley’s Virtual Economics blog, and, on submitting my comment, was told an error had occurred that involved me typing a challenge/response code to prove I wasn’t a bot either! So be careful if you comment on this one: if, like me, you find these bot-proofing systems difficult to read then I wonder what happens. Does Google/Wordpress/Blogger ‘ban’ you?

The idea of intelligent search engines – more intuitive than keywords – is a fascinating one. Check out my post on the subject.