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People on that thread also noticed more keywords and think it might be Akamai WAF. I don't know enough about it be sure.

You can't have some strings in the URL for the main NSA.gov domain as well. So https://nsa.gov/fakething?hey=traceroute will give you the same error.

Yeah it's clear that a system is just blindly grepping the request url for certain keywords and killing the query.

So you can't search for `traceroute` or `tracert` directly but you can search for misspelling like `tracerout` and the results page just ends up showing the search results for `traceroute` so it's not exactly a very sophisticated filter.

Well the purpose of the filter is almost certainly to prevent running the command on the server in case of an attack, not to prevent it from being searched on Google. You'd have to spell it correctly to get the server to execute it.

You also can't search alert(1), so probably just a silly WAF.

Or for `<script>`

Not weird, just WAF.