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Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot
Is anybody else experience this, asked around in a few slack chats and coworkers and they are all going through this.
- davelnewton 8y agoAre you a robot?
- longcommonname 8y ago
- debacle 8y agoAre you using a VPN or sharing an IP with something that might be making wget requests or similar to Google APIs? Whenever I channeled my traffic through my own VPN (Digital Ocean), I would get the "Are you a robot?" screen very often (at least hourly).
- hrbrmstr 8y agoYep. If you move around in google faster than "normal" humans it's flagging that behaviour more lately. I suspect some malicious (i.e. made by content thieves) web scraping instrumentation frameworks have added more natural human behaviours to their capabilities but still operate at a higher-than-"normal human" rate and those of us who are highly adept at legitimately utilizing google now fit into that new classifier slot. It's been super annoying.
- chadash 8y agoIt likely has to do with your IP address. Two possibilities that I can think of: 1) You are all on a VPN that's hosted at AWS or another cloud provider. Google assumes you to be a bot based on the IP address being in a data center. 2) Someone is doing a lot of scraping through a computer in the office, which triggered Google to flag your office IP address for bots (which in this case would technically be correct)
- is_true 8y ago3) using modificators when you or someone else searches from your network. If not try with a turing test.
- Crontab 8y agoI have my browser set to delete all cookies every time I close it. I've been doing this for years but lately, every time I decide to alter my search settings, I get a Captcha. I have tested this at work and it does the same thing there. I suspect that this is intentional and a way to punish people who are trying to avoid tracking cookies.
- testb 8y agoGoogle doesn't even trust itself. My VPN is hosted on GCP and I get these regularly. Sometimes the header is missing and I have to guess which item I'm trying to select.
- O_H_E 8y agoIts all nice for generic searches, but whenever I try to pin down something that I know exists but can't find anymore they start throwing captchas at me. And I never find what I am looking for.
- achairapart 8y agoThis happens when you use a VPN but also occurred to me from time to time when just searching lots of things really fast... Also: It's utterly frustrating to pick cars, front-end stores, bridges etc. The process is also slow as hell. Worst UX ever for a problem that's really not mine but actually theirs.