4 ms·

This makes me think of userbinator's comment from yesterday's Google Memory Loss post. To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly var

This makes me think of userbinator's comment from yesterday's Google Memory Loss post. To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something you know exists, very often it will think you're a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours. Edit: I wonder if Google is using this as a sort of income source for pages that bring little to no ad revenue.

userbinator 9y ago
I thought this item would be related to that very popular item... I saw it mentioned in discussion. At work I just recently managed to trip it three times in one day, which I consider a record since in the past I've encountered it at most a few times a week. What's more infuriating is that my queries were far less complex than the ones that tripped it before (trying to find information about some API constants), basically one quoted term and one site: modifier. I can understand if I was querying 24/7 and hogging their servers (in which case a nice "please slow down" message would be much better), but it tripped within a few minutes of, admittedly intense, Googling. The security device may notify the attacker device that the solution is incorrect regardless of whether the solution is actually correct. In Google's case, it doesn't do that at all --- solve one CAPTCHA successfully and all you get is another, immediately. If you actually do deliberately give the wrong answers, it does tell you they were incorrect. I wonder what can be done to stop it from doing that, besides the old tactic of evading IP bans by changing IP --- it's somewhat creepy to think that it's probably capable of detecting that too and banning the entire subnet. On second thought, it might be worth it... if it means I can get thousands of others blocked from Google for a nontrivial amount of time, all the more mouths to complain and maybe force some reconsideration. I am not a robot. I am not a competitor scraping your pages or doing anything else against your ToS. I am just an intelligent human with over two decades of Internet searching experience enthusiastically using your service for the exact purpose it claims to do: to find something on the Internet.
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  >In Google's case, it doesn't do that at all --- solve one CAPTCHA successfully and all you get is another, immediately. I have experienced Google doing the endless captcha when using Opera's built in VPN. The first time I went through about 3 captchas and then I "knew" they were messing with me. So, now, I just change my location in the VPN, and get back the searching...
- cm2187 9y ago
  Happened to me as well. As far as I can tell bing doesn’t seem to do that, or at least it is harder to trigger.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Happened to me too, but not over my normal DSL IP, but while browsing through Tor. As you note, one CAPTCHA is replaced by another seemingly without end. I gave up after 3 or so tries and switched to DDG, which is what I use when browsing over Tor. It's Google's loss, certainly not mine. Which shows how important it is for Internet health that we have search competitors to Google who maintain their own indexes. No one company should become the sole practical gateway to the Net.
- josteink 9y ago
  > I am not a robot. I am not a competitor scraping your pages or doing anything else against your ToS. I am just an intelligent human with over two decades of Internet searching experience enthusiastically using your service for the exact purpose it claims to do: to find something on the Internet. Maybe it’s time to stop using Google and use another search engine which actually treat you like a human being, like DuckDuckGo.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    That's what I do whenever it comes up. For the longest time I used Google because they had the biggest index, but if they're not keen on letting people actually make use of it, then DDG and the others suddenly look a lot more appealing.
jpatokal 9y ago
For clarity, while the link is to Google Patents (a public service for searching patents), the actual patent is from Juniper Networks, not Google.
chatmasta 9y ago
I think most people don’t realize this “endless” CAPTCHA is actually an average of three iterations. You’re supposed to stop when you see no squares with X in them. That is, you should click submit even when there are zero squares matching the CAPTCHA criteria. Once you realize this it’s way less confusing, and in fact it even clearly states the instructions at the top of the CAPTCHA. But it’s super confusing and definitely a usability nightmare. The goal, as I see it, is to increase the number of round trips to google required to solve a CAPTCHA, in order to increase the cost for those using CAPTCHA solving services.
- yoz-y 9y ago
  Not in my experience. It would give me “select cars until none are visible” and it would be replacing the last car by another one for a long time. Then, when there are finally none, it would just offer another captcha, such a as “click on storefronts until there are none”. And so on and on
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    Their mapping AI isn't going to train itself, and unlike the proofreading CAPTCHA, this one actually benefits Google's bottom line by providing free input for a proprietary data set. These Google CAPTCHA's are deployed all over the internet, but you mostly won't notice them until you use a VPN. When you do, you get them at what seems to be their strictest setting: multiple rounds of 'click the object that is a car/storefront/road/mountain/road sign/bus/river', where all pictures clicked are replaced via a fade-out-fade-in that lasts about five seconds before you can continue evaluating the new picture.
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      I do not blame Google, they do what they do for their own benefit. However, when I do get to solve a never ending captcha in a mobile app, while being logged with a user account, while buying a cinema ticket—I get really pissed. Not at Google, but at whoever thought that putting a captcha there was a good idea.
    - 9y ago

userbinator 9y ago

I thought this item would be related to that very popular item... I saw it mentioned in discussion. At work I just recently managed to trip it three times in one day, which I consider a record since in the past I've encountered it at most a few times a week. What's more infuriating is that my queries were far less complex than the ones that tripped it before (trying to find information about some API constants), basically one quoted term and one site: modifier. I can understand if I was querying 24/7 and hogging their servers (in which case a nice "please slow down" message would be much better), but it tripped within a few minutes of, admittedly intense, Googling. The security device may notify the attacker device that the solution is incorrect regardless of whether the solution is actually correct. In Google's case, it doesn't do that at all --- solve one CAPTCHA successfully and all you get is another, immediately. If you actually do deliberately give the wrong answers, it does tell you they were incorrect. I wonder what can be done to stop it from doing that, besides the old tactic of evading IP bans by changing IP --- it's somewhat creepy to think that it's probably capable of detecting that too and banning the entire subnet. On second thought, it might be worth it... if it means I can get thousands of others blocked from Google for a nontrivial amount of time, all the more mouths to complain and maybe force some reconsideration. I am not a robot. I am not a competitor scraping your pages or doing anything else against your ToS. I am just an intelligent human with over two decades of Internet searching experience enthusiastically using your service for the exact purpose it claims to do: to find something on the Internet.

RobertRoberts 9y ago
>In Google's case, it doesn't do that at all --- solve one CAPTCHA successfully and all you get is another, immediately. I have experienced Google doing the endless captcha when using Opera's built in VPN. The first time I went through about 3 captchas and then I "knew" they were messing with me. So, now, I just change my location in the VPN, and get back the searching...
cm2187 9y ago
Happened to me as well. As far as I can tell bing doesn’t seem to do that, or at least it is harder to trigger.
Santosh83 9y ago
Happened to me too, but not over my normal DSL IP, but while browsing through Tor. As you note, one CAPTCHA is replaced by another seemingly without end. I gave up after 3 or so tries and switched to DDG, which is what I use when browsing over Tor. It's Google's loss, certainly not mine. Which shows how important it is for Internet health that we have search competitors to Google who maintain their own indexes. No one company should become the sole practical gateway to the Net.
josteink 9y ago
> I am not a robot. I am not a competitor scraping your pages or doing anything else against your ToS. I am just an intelligent human with over two decades of Internet searching experience enthusiastically using your service for the exact purpose it claims to do: to find something on the Internet. Maybe it’s time to stop using Google and use another search engine which actually treat you like a human being, like DuckDuckGo.
- userbinator 9y ago
  That's what I do whenever it comes up. For the longest time I used Google because they had the biggest index, but if they're not keen on letting people actually make use of it, then DDG and the others suddenly look a lot more appealing.

jpatokal 9y ago

For clarity, while the link is to Google Patents (a public service for searching patents), the actual patent is from Juniper Networks, not Google.

chatmasta 9y ago

I think most people don’t realize this “endless” CAPTCHA is actually an average of three iterations. You’re supposed to stop when you see no squares with X in them. That is, you should click submit even when there are zero squares matching the CAPTCHA criteria. Once you realize this it’s way less confusing, and in fact it even clearly states the instructions at the top of the CAPTCHA. But it’s super confusing and definitely a usability nightmare. The goal, as I see it, is to increase the number of round trips to google required to solve a CAPTCHA, in order to increase the cost for those using CAPTCHA solving services.

yoz-y 9y ago
Not in my experience. It would give me “select cars until none are visible” and it would be replacing the last car by another one for a long time. Then, when there are finally none, it would just offer another captcha, such a as “click on storefronts until there are none”. And so on and on
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Their mapping AI isn't going to train itself, and unlike the proofreading CAPTCHA, this one actually benefits Google's bottom line by providing free input for a proprietary data set. These Google CAPTCHA's are deployed all over the internet, but you mostly won't notice them until you use a VPN. When you do, you get them at what seems to be their strictest setting: multiple rounds of 'click the object that is a car/storefront/road/mountain/road sign/bus/river', where all pictures clicked are replaced via a fade-out-fade-in that lasts about five seconds before you can continue evaluating the new picture.
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    I do not blame Google, they do what they do for their own benefit. However, when I do get to solve a never ending captcha in a mobile app, while being logged with a user account, while buying a cinema ticket—I get really pissed. Not at Google, but at whoever thought that putting a captcha there was a good idea.
  - 9y ago