Captchas are not "a bit of an illusion." In the past I ran very large, bespoke data mining campaigns, and ReCaptcha was continually a source of annoyance. My us

Captchas are not "a bit of an illusion." In the past I ran very large, bespoke data mining campaigns, and ReCaptcha was continually a source of annoyance. My usual response to seeing ReCaptcha was to work on a different project or find a different dataset, because spending even a few cents per request to solve the captcha would make collecting the dataset unviable unless I was very certain it would pay off.