
Ask HN: Using VPN I get captcha'd by Google search – for what reason? - perlpimp
I am using an established VPN provider. For some reason when I execute search using google services I get confronted with google catpcha trying to verify, something is bothering their systems.<p>Just wonder what might be causing this, if anyone ran into that and how I can stop this.
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ChuckMcM
Shared IP, inhuman number of queries per second. And an IP which is associated
with a hosting provider (AWS, Azure, Etc) and thus unlikely to be a user
endpoint. Lots of scripted searches are identified on those two data points.

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detaro
Theories:

Too many different users from one IP

the VPN provider uses IP space from their hosting provider and normal users
normally don't have IPs from a range where you'd expect servers

Someone ran bots from the same IP range (hosting provider)

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2bluesc
I run my own OpenVPN server on DO and experience this. There are fewer users
(only me, and not that often) on that IP then my home IP.

I always assumed that it was due to the netblock the request originated from.

Experience this with Google and Cloudflare

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ohashi
Yup. Got a DO VPN and get this. Didn't always get it though, can't remember
when it really started but I think within last year or two.

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digitaloracle86
We had this issue in the office, as we are dealing with many types of malware
and viruses we were sure that we have some kind of bot in the network, we
traced some queries to google from one VM, than killed it and the requests
started coming from other VM and so on.

Eventually we were able to pinpoint this to specific toolbar that was bombing
Google with PageRank requests.

After removing this toolbar- all went back to normal, so perhaps some users
that using the same VPN provider are using some sort of tool and abusing
google.

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kbenson
My pet guess would be that the VPN provider is anonymizing cookies for you in
some way to provide more secure browsing, and it's causing Google to be a bit
leery that you might be trying to automate searches through them. Whether this
is feasibly possible or not also depends on your VPN config, given Google's
use of HTTPS everywhere.

