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.
It reset itself the next day, but it really opened my eyes to the power they have slowly obtained over my life.
(Alternative hypothesis: If you solve a captcha correctly, they intentionally give you a few more, to get more good data for their AI algos.)
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.
The fact stands that google locked me away from my documents and intentionally undermined my ability to understand what had happened or rectify the situation.
Collateral damage is still damage.
It also might just be a broken integration with recaptcha.
If you select the unknowns as well as all of the known answers (and don't select the wrong answers) they can train their AI robots that the extras you selected are also a part of the "has traffic lights" dataset
Assuming it's traditional Google search from your ISP, there other alternatives such as using startpage.com or Tor.
It took about 5 minutes to get past the (Google) captcha.
First I clicked that I'm not a robot, but then it gave me the photos of doom. After clicking all the right pictures of a bus, say, then I had to wait while they fade out and fade in new ones rather slowly. There were about 5 rounds of selecting. Then it would pick another noun and ask for that. After a few nouns of a number of rounds each, it cycled back to the first noun. A doubly-nested loop of time-delayed captchas!
Thankfully it wasn't important.
But it makes me appreciate how someone getting locked out of their own Gmail or Google Docs must feel.
Needed to do your job today? Tough luck, better luck tomorrow maybe.
I suspect that if you have a machine that is less likely to be fingerprinted uniquely, you have to solve more captcha. In this case, I happened to be using Firefox on Linux with a few privacy related addons running. If they believe you are a bot, because you're not watching their ads, or because you are running a privacy enhanced environment, I suspect their algorithms will slow you down.
It would be interesting to prove this hypothesis. I wonder if you browse with Windows + Chrome + No Ad Blockers, if you get right through the captchas vs. if you use Linux + Firefox + Ad block or maybe even the Tor browser.
Bye Google.
Its a perfect example of passive aggressive dysfunctionality when it comes to big tech.
Sometimes I use one of these operators by mistake and get instantaneously hellbanned from using google. The first time the captchas kept reappearing a whole day. I read somewhere that the ban is resetted the next day, but the next day I was still getting the captchas and couldn't use google for anything.
I deleted all cookies and suddenly I wasn't banned anymore. So this looks to me like a captcha bug, or a chrome bug, or both. Probably both.
There are many other search engines as well as other ways to access the google index.
Also, a couple of years ago someone posted a search engine he wrote, which was able to index the internet for ~$200/month hosting costs. Sure, it doesn’t do partial or full javascript eval like google, so it doesn’t index the deeper web. But “laser air breakdown” is likely mostly in plain HTML docs.
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".
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)
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.
* Power users are far fewer than ordinary people. * Power users are hard to manipulate, and hard to satisfy.
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".
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.
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.)
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."
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...
While more variety in search engines would be great, they'd still be choke points.
What's really needed is a decentralized search engine.
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.
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.