
Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot - longcommonname
Is anybody else experience this, asked around in a few slack chats and coworkers and they are all going through this.
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debacle
Are 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).

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Crontab
I 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.

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hrbrmstr
Yep. 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.

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chadash
It 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
3) using modificators when you or someone else searches from your network.

If not try with a turing test.

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achairapart
This 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.

------
O_H_E
Its 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.

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testb
Google 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.

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davelnewton
Are you a robot?

