Rep. #100692927: G.scholar -> Zotero crashing after importing 5 pages of results

MGatta

Hello,

My zotero gives me an error after having imported 5 pages of results in google scholar. Each page of 20 results, all selected items imported into my library. I had to do two captchas to prove im not a human, but now it's plainly not working.
I have re-started my computer, refreshed the page, open and closed mozilla, but nothing works, I just get a generic problem message directing me to the know issues page (https://www.zotero.org/support/troubleshooting_translator_issues).

I have a mozilla add on, all the current versions, installed on a Windows 7.

I'd appreciate any help.

adamsmith

yeah, google just locks you out after too many rapid requests. I don't think there's anything we can do about that.

Rintze

I don't think there's anything we can do about that.

Couldn't the Google Scholar translator give a more descriptive error message, though? Like: "... \n Google often temporarily blocks access after high-volume metadata lookups.". Or aren't error messages customizable via translators?

adamsmith

The way the error message currently works, translators can't actually change it (in technical terms, it's an error message produced by translate.js, not by the translator itself).
I think it'd be lovely if we could display customized error messages for errors that we know may appear but we can't do anything about such as this one or a pubmed API outage, but at least right now that's not possible.

MGatta

Ok, but, how long does it take for me to be able to download references again? It's been several hours now, and I'm still not able to download them.

adamsmith

varies -- typically might be about a day. You may be able to get around it by deleting cookies, but again, it's google's setting and they have an interest in making it somewhat unpredictable (because it's an anti-bot setting, and everything that's predictable, a bot can likely work around).
If you want to import large amounts of literature, I'd try to see if there's no alternative search engine you can use that doesn't impose such restrictions.

MGatta

Ok, thanks.
Maybe I'll have to have a look at using other search engines.