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I've found it the case if you do more then one "advanced" searches using these operators, your flagged as "unusual activity" and have to do captcha to prove yo

I've found it the case if you do more then one "advanced" searches using these operators, your flagged as "unusual activity" and have to do captcha to prove you not a bot.

zzzcpan 8y ago
Yeah, this is some cloudflare-level "security" abused to the point where we enter this strange paradoxical state. Advanced features exist, but are not allowed to be used enough by anyone to actually learn them and use often.
- fuhrysteve 8y ago
  Honestly I bet it's a learning algorithm that they used to identify bots, rather than something a human decided. Spam detection algorithms usually have a training set. One of the features could have been "uses_feature_x", which, according to the training set, is known to have a high probability of being a spam bot (because humans rarely use those features)
zozbot123 8y ago
This is why we need more variety in search engines. Google does not want you doing "advanced" and "unusual" things with their service anymore, because they're scared that SEOs will use this to manipulate their search outcomes. But of course every SEO targets Google anyway, so the "plain vanilla" results are just as terrible!
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  The main reason they block this is because it's used by malware as in infection vector - makes it easy to find vulnerable hosts running outdated webapps for example.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    The fact that they're restricting this feature across the board suggests that they're more scared about SEO efforts. Malware-related searches would be easier to spot as an anomaly and filter out (and the article states that they do this in some cases).
    - shittyadmin 8y ago
      They don't restrict it across the board, I use many of these operators all the time without issue, the only time I run into difficulties is doing very specific "Google dork"-like queries repetitively.
      - zozbot123 8y ago
        That's exactly the SEO use case though. I mean, it's not exactly a secret that grey/black-hat SEOs want to do this, the problem is that the limits Google places on it inconvenience every power user too!
        shittyadmin 8y ago
        I must be missing something here - How would this impact SEO? Blackhat SEO is primarily about generating false backlinks to your site, often through blog and comment spam. Search queries to Google will have little if any impact, especially using fancier operators.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Part of me thinks it's not their responsibility to do this. It's pretty paternalistic behavior. It seems typical of Google these days, though. I don't understand why they seem to be actively opposed to power users, all across their products.
    - eitland 8y ago
      > I don't understand why they seem to be actively opposed to power users, all across their products. Why is everyone so actively opposed to power users? I blame tbe field of UX that - instead of working to improve products so that ordinary people can achieve more - always decides to work on dumbing down the products so "everyone" can use them.
      - netheril96 8y ago
        Because catering to power users is bad for business, and catering to the masses is good for it. * Power users are far fewer than ordinary people. * Power users are hard to manipulate, and hard to satisfy.
      - MRD85 8y ago
        I feel for some companies this has backfired in the long run. Take for example Blizzard, a video game company. They used to have a perfect reputation but over time it has tarnished due to catering to the masses. World of Warcraft became more and more accessible over time, and eventually reached a point where it was so accessible that no one wanted to play it since it wasn't fun and there was nothing to achieve. Diablo 3 was meant to appeal to the mass market but it was really obvious to everyone that the game was horrible since it wasn't actually meant for anyone in particular. They literally had design choices that were obvious to teenagers that it was a profit-making machine. I haven't really been a video gamer in years but AFAIK they don't have the same reputation and are just an ordinary company now due to changing their model from "amazing product" to "mass market product".
    - userbinator 8y ago
      I don't understand why they seem to be actively opposed to power users, all across their products. Power users are the ones who know how things work; they are difficult to manipulate and mislead, will use their knowledge to consume content in the way they want (blocking ads, stripping DRM, rooting devices, etc.), and are in general not docile and "obedient". In summary: power users know how to control their destiny, and this is something companies like Google are opposed to, because those companies want to be the ones in control.
  - puzzle 8y ago
    No, the main reason I know about is that advanced operators are more resource intensive than regular queries. Not blocking these would affect search for everybody else. That, of course, also tends to take care of spammers, malware as you described and just plain buggy bots. Those can be tackled with additional measures, but first and foremost Google cares about search latency. (And quality: higher latency reduces quality, too.)
    - userbinator 8y ago
      And quality: higher latency reduces quality, too Ridiculous. I'd rather wait longer for better results. Even in the real world there is a correspondingly analogous saying: "Think carefully before you open your mouth."
      - puzzle 8y ago
        You're right, in theory, but that's not how things work in reality at scale. Remember that every search query propagates through at least a thousand machines.
      - zozbot123 8y ago
        These days I have to wait longer simply because of Google's "auto-search" functionality and their heavy use of JS. It's like it's trying to guess what I want to see before I'm even done inputing a search query-- which I'm sure is very convenient for novices, not so much if you're a power user and looking for something specific. Other search engines (Bing, DDG) don't have this problem, of course. I think Google have just stopped even trying to maintain their "flagship" Search service - that the only way I could explain how their search quality and website responsiveness could decline to the level of the old Yahoo.com and Altavista. And don't get me started about the sorry state of their Google Groups archive...
- ur-whale 8y ago
  >This is why we need more variety in search engines While more variety in search engines would be great, they'd still be choke points. What's really needed is a decentralized search engine.
jjoonathan 8y ago
I got "hellbanned" the other day -- google kept giving me captchas but always marked my answers incorrect. 20 minutes later, I gave up and drove to the library (!). It reset itself the next day, but it really opened my eyes to the power they have slowly obtained over my life.
- yesco 8y ago
  Why not just use a different search engine? Was the library that much easier in this case?
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    Google search wasn't the product being gatekept by google's captcha.
- DKWf8EV 8y ago
  I don't think you really got hellbanned, Google captchas have just become extremely buggy in recent months. Whenever I have to solve one it always takes me a few tries, sometimes a dozen or more, and I usually triple check whether I've actually selected all the traffic lights/bicycles/chimneys/whatevers before submitting... (Alternative hypothesis: If you solve a captcha correctly, they intentionally give you a few more, to get more good data for their AI algos.)
  - nkurz 8y ago
    It's ironic that this comment saying about "hellbanning" was "autodead", and I had to "vouch" to revive it.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      I wonder if it hit some automatic filter by virtue of being new, and talking about banning/hellbanning?
  - warent 8y ago
    I'm inclined to go with your alternative hypothesis. The quality of the captcha response degrades the more times you solve it consecutively. I was recently developing a web frontend that had a captcha implementation on the login form. The first couple times I solved the captcha there was no problem. Then once it got to fourth and fifth one it started making me solve a few of captcha pages in a row. Eventually it was forcing me to solve several pages of "Select the picture of the fire hydrant" over and over, often marking it as incorrect when it definitely wasn't, and then restarting back from the beginning so each run-through took multiple minutes forcing you to solve dozens of captcha pages before accepting it as correct. So, to add to your hypothesis, they're probably doing this intentionally not only to get more data for their AI algos, but also to mitigate people training bots on CAPTCHAs. EDIT: Also the fact that you're being downvoted is baffling to me but my tinfoil hat persona makes me wonder if it's some orchestrated downvote because you're pointing out a hypothesis that Google is trying to keep hidden.
blhack 8y ago
Currently running into this problem. I've gotten really frustrated trying to read the news lately, where washingtonpost especially will say that I've used up all my free articles for the month, and can't read anymore. Okay, that's fine, but then I'd rather not see them in my google results. If wapo wants to put their content behind a paywall, cool, but google should be an index of things I can read. So I've been experimenting with various search flags to exclude them. Started getting hit with captchas just now.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  If you're on a Macintosh or iDevice, Apple News lets you block specific sources. I use this to lock out sources that are behind a paywall, or that only feed Apple News one paragraph and require you to click/scroll through to their site for the full story. Often nothing is lost because those sites are only barely functional on mobile anyway.
mario0b1 8y ago
https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ does not have this problem. (And it has really good search results too)
- wasim_ullah 8y ago
  They are not as flexible and powerful.
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
You can search on duckduckgo with the g! operator. This makes the search anonymous (does it?) That's why duckduckgo is my default search engine.
- aw3c2 8y ago
  Not at all! All that does is redirect you to Google.
- 0eye 8y ago
  No. DDG can't stop Google's tracking if you use the Google bang. Says right in the bang docs.
mateo1 8y ago
I've encountered the same issue. On top of that, you're no longer allowed to search for specific strings with the '"' operator. It just ignores it. What a world we live in. I can dictate an email to my phone or search videos based on the semantic interpretation of their automated audio transcriptions (yes I've noticed Youtube will sometimes do this) but I can't search for some unpopular technical term because I'm obviously a bot if I do this. Thanks for correcting me Google, of course I meant to search about "laser hair removal", not "laser air breakdown".

I've found it the case if you do more then one "advanced" searches using these operators, your flagged as "unusual activity" and have to do captcha to prove you not a bot.

zzzcpan 8y ago

Yeah, this is some cloudflare-level "security" abused to the point where we enter this strange paradoxical state. Advanced features exist, but are not allowed to be used enough by anyone to actually learn them and use often.

fuhrysteve 8y ago
Honestly I bet it's a learning algorithm that they used to identify bots, rather than something a human decided. Spam detection algorithms usually have a training set. One of the features could have been "uses_feature_x", which, according to the training set, is known to have a high probability of being a spam bot (because humans rarely use those features)

zozbot123 8y ago

This is why we need more variety in search engines. Google does not want you doing "advanced" and "unusual" things with their service anymore, because they're scared that SEOs will use this to manipulate their search outcomes. But of course every SEO targets Google anyway, so the "plain vanilla" results are just as terrible!

shittyadmin 8y ago
The main reason they block this is because it's used by malware as in infection vector - makes it easy to find vulnerable hosts running outdated webapps for example.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  The fact that they're restricting this feature across the board suggests that they're more scared about SEO efforts. Malware-related searches would be easier to spot as an anomaly and filter out (and the article states that they do this in some cases).
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    They don't restrict it across the board, I use many of these operators all the time without issue, the only time I run into difficulties is doing very specific "Google dork"-like queries repetitively.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      That's exactly the SEO use case though. I mean, it's not exactly a secret that grey/black-hat SEOs want to do this, the problem is that the limits Google places on it inconvenience every power user too!
      - shittyadmin 8y ago
        I must be missing something here - How would this impact SEO? Blackhat SEO is primarily about generating false backlinks to your site, often through blog and comment spam. Search queries to Google will have little if any impact, especially using fancier operators.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Part of me thinks it's not their responsibility to do this. It's pretty paternalistic behavior. It seems typical of Google these days, though. I don't understand why they seem to be actively opposed to power users, all across their products.
  - eitland 8y ago
    > I don't understand why they seem to be actively opposed to power users, all across their products. Why is everyone so actively opposed to power users? I blame tbe field of UX that - instead of working to improve products so that ordinary people can achieve more - always decides to work on dumbing down the products so "everyone" can use them.
    - netheril96 8y ago
      Because catering to power users is bad for business, and catering to the masses is good for it. * Power users are far fewer than ordinary people. * Power users are hard to manipulate, and hard to satisfy.
    - MRD85 8y ago
      I feel for some companies this has backfired in the long run. Take for example Blizzard, a video game company. They used to have a perfect reputation but over time it has tarnished due to catering to the masses. World of Warcraft became more and more accessible over time, and eventually reached a point where it was so accessible that no one wanted to play it since it wasn't fun and there was nothing to achieve. Diablo 3 was meant to appeal to the mass market but it was really obvious to everyone that the game was horrible since it wasn't actually meant for anyone in particular. They literally had design choices that were obvious to teenagers that it was a profit-making machine. I haven't really been a video gamer in years but AFAIK they don't have the same reputation and are just an ordinary company now due to changing their model from "amazing product" to "mass market product".
  - userbinator 8y ago
    I don't understand why they seem to be actively opposed to power users, all across their products. Power users are the ones who know how things work; they are difficult to manipulate and mislead, will use their knowledge to consume content in the way they want (blocking ads, stripping DRM, rooting devices, etc.), and are in general not docile and "obedient". In summary: power users know how to control their destiny, and this is something companies like Google are opposed to, because those companies want to be the ones in control.
- puzzle 8y ago
  No, the main reason I know about is that advanced operators are more resource intensive than regular queries. Not blocking these would affect search for everybody else. That, of course, also tends to take care of spammers, malware as you described and just plain buggy bots. Those can be tackled with additional measures, but first and foremost Google cares about search latency. (And quality: higher latency reduces quality, too.)
  - userbinator 8y ago
    And quality: higher latency reduces quality, too Ridiculous. I'd rather wait longer for better results. Even in the real world there is a correspondingly analogous saying: "Think carefully before you open your mouth."
    - puzzle 8y ago
      You're right, in theory, but that's not how things work in reality at scale. Remember that every search query propagates through at least a thousand machines.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      These days I have to wait longer simply because of Google's "auto-search" functionality and their heavy use of JS. It's like it's trying to guess what I want to see before I'm even done inputing a search query-- which I'm sure is very convenient for novices, not so much if you're a power user and looking for something specific. Other search engines (Bing, DDG) don't have this problem, of course. I think Google have just stopped even trying to maintain their "flagship" Search service - that the only way I could explain how their search quality and website responsiveness could decline to the level of the old Yahoo.com and Altavista. And don't get me started about the sorry state of their Google Groups archive...
ur-whale 8y ago
>This is why we need more variety in search engines While more variety in search engines would be great, they'd still be choke points. What's really needed is a decentralized search engine.

jjoonathan 8y ago

I got "hellbanned" the other day -- google kept giving me captchas but always marked my answers incorrect. 20 minutes later, I gave up and drove to the library (!). It reset itself the next day, but it really opened my eyes to the power they have slowly obtained over my life.

yesco 8y ago
Why not just use a different search engine? Was the library that much easier in this case?
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Google search wasn't the product being gatekept by google's captcha.
DKWf8EV 8y ago
I don't think you really got hellbanned, Google captchas have just become extremely buggy in recent months. Whenever I have to solve one it always takes me a few tries, sometimes a dozen or more, and I usually triple check whether I've actually selected all the traffic lights/bicycles/chimneys/whatevers before submitting... (Alternative hypothesis: If you solve a captcha correctly, they intentionally give you a few more, to get more good data for their AI algos.)
- nkurz 8y ago
  It's ironic that this comment saying about "hellbanning" was "autodead", and I had to "vouch" to revive it.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    I wonder if it hit some automatic filter by virtue of being new, and talking about banning/hellbanning?
- warent 8y ago
  I'm inclined to go with your alternative hypothesis. The quality of the captcha response degrades the more times you solve it consecutively. I was recently developing a web frontend that had a captcha implementation on the login form. The first couple times I solved the captcha there was no problem. Then once it got to fourth and fifth one it started making me solve a few of captcha pages in a row. Eventually it was forcing me to solve several pages of "Select the picture of the fire hydrant" over and over, often marking it as incorrect when it definitely wasn't, and then restarting back from the beginning so each run-through took multiple minutes forcing you to solve dozens of captcha pages before accepting it as correct. So, to add to your hypothesis, they're probably doing this intentionally not only to get more data for their AI algos, but also to mitigate people training bots on CAPTCHAs. EDIT: Also the fact that you're being downvoted is baffling to me but my tinfoil hat persona makes me wonder if it's some orchestrated downvote because you're pointing out a hypothesis that Google is trying to keep hidden.

blhack 8y ago

Currently running into this problem. I've gotten really frustrated trying to read the news lately, where washingtonpost especially will say that I've used up all my free articles for the month, and can't read anymore. Okay, that's fine, but then I'd rather not see them in my google results. If wapo wants to put their content behind a paywall, cool, but google should be an index of things I can read. So I've been experimenting with various search flags to exclude them. Started getting hit with captchas just now.

reaperducer 8y ago
If you're on a Macintosh or iDevice, Apple News lets you block specific sources. I use this to lock out sources that are behind a paywall, or that only feed Apple News one paragraph and require you to click/scroll through to their site for the full story. Often nothing is lost because those sites are only barely functional on mobile anyway.

mario0b1 8y ago

https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ does not have this problem. (And it has really good search results too)

wasim_ullah 8y ago
They are not as flexible and powerful.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

You can search on duckduckgo with the g! operator. This makes the search anonymous (does it?) That's why duckduckgo is my default search engine.

aw3c2 8y ago
Not at all! All that does is redirect you to Google.
0eye 8y ago
No. DDG can't stop Google's tracking if you use the Google bang. Says right in the bang docs.

mateo1 8y ago

I've encountered the same issue. On top of that, you're no longer allowed to search for specific strings with the '"' operator. It just ignores it. What a world we live in. I can dictate an email to my phone or search videos based on the semantic interpretation of their automated audio transcriptions (yes I've noticed Youtube will sometimes do this) but I can't search for some unpopular technical term because I'm obviously a bot if I do this. Thanks for correcting me Google, of course I meant to search about "laser hair removal", not "laser air breakdown".