Hi Jim, this can happen when you increase your privacy approach to a level that makes Google suspect you are a bot or attacker. It's difficult to say exactly what settings or changes could have crossed the line but, for example, if you don't allow any cookies to be set or if your Firefox is set to identify itself as some other browser, that might be a factor.

By the way, what you do mean about "via Outlook"? Is there a way to generate a web search in Firefox from inside Microsoft Outlook?