That quadrillion results bit is like a relic from a bygone era, when people actually cared. I have not hit captchas very often. Even IP bans only last hours.

That quadrillion results bit is like a relic from a bygone era, when people actually cared. I have not hit captchas very often. Even IP bans only last hours. It is annoying, but low risk. I do searching from shell prompt, never browser. What always amazed me about Google is that they are not willing to let users to skip pages 1-11 and immediately jump to, say, page 12. Sometimes queries are non-commercial and there are no ads. Still, jumping straight to page 12 can trigger a captcha. I wrote a script that reverses or randomises the order of Google results, as an experiment.