It reset itself the next day, but it really opened my eyes to the power they have slowly obtained over my life.
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.
(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
Bye Google.
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.
Assuming it's traditional Google search from your ISP, there other alternatives such as using startpage.com or Tor.
Its a perfect example of passive aggressive dysfunctionality when it comes to big tech.