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Comment by friedturkey | Hacker News Reader

Google sometimes blocks me from searching using Firefox, saying it’s “suspicious activity” and sending me into captcha hell that always rejects my results after several screens for no reason.

It’s incredibly transparent as to what they’re doing. That Google became the most anti-consumer company out there is pretty disgraceful.

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I use google constantly— sometimes hundreds of times per day— both logged in and out, almost exclusively in Firefox or Firefox developer edition and I've never encountered this. I'd bank on it being a network thing— VPN, overcrowded proxy, etc.

The beauty of AI is that it's likely no human can say precisely why two similar users might get a different classification.

...and the beauty of the Internet is that there's really no way to be sure people are being genuine...

Long time Firefox user and HNer here.

I've at least been "captchaed" in Firefox. While being logged in with my Gmail account from 2005.

I've been "captchaed" with Chrome, so I'm not sure the anecdotes amount to much.

That's interesting and useful to know and I decide to believe you.

BTW: Yes, I absolutely noticed that you said this above:

> ...and the beauty of the Internet is that there's really no way to be sure people are being genuine...

My point is, unless the claims of the others are outrageous or we have something very specific to point at, I don't think voicing these kind of thoughts do much good.

Which is why it's better to believe people until you have a clear reason not to, in case they are genuine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

tbf, that is the beauty of people in general and not the Internet

It's not that important whether these reports are genuine or not. The important point is that many people are not surprised by these reports. Google has long failed people's trust in them.

I'm not saying the browser isn't a factor, or that Google isn't anti-consumer, or anything else. The original comment didn't say they were caught up in some unobservable AI machination. They made a pretty straightforward observation mentioning only two conditions: Google bounces them when using Firefox. From that, they jumped to a pretty straightforward conclusion— Google transparently harasses Firefox users to advance their corporate strategy.

I'm not going to jump through hoops to prove a negative, but correlation does not imply causation.

My empirical observation: For many years I have constantly used Google search on FF with many machines and networks, logged in and not, in private mode and not, with all existing privacy features enabled and no extensions beyond a password manager. Napkin math conservatively estimates I've conducted 200k searches minimum using this combo. I've consistently encountered suspicious activity challenges when using overcrowded proxies, NAT'd networks and VPNs. Removing those factors has never failed to stop the challenges. Ever.

I'm confident the poster's observations are accurate. My observation does not directly contradicts their observation, but it does contradicts their conclusion. I wouldn't be surprised if other factors like JS being enabled, cookie settings, plugins that affected those things, number of other users on their network, or even the public IP range they fall under would affect it.

I get it ln firefox without a VPN with my own IP owner by a reputable ISP. On a pixel phone with google DNS.

On a VPN I do not get it, so the last couple of weeks I have been making heavy use of my mullvad account.

Edit: however. I only store cookies for fastmail and hacker news and do not allow JS on many sites.

I have had the same experience the previous commenter had when I'm on my phone. It would happen quite randomly and sometimes the captcha hell would resolve and I could go back to normal search, while other times it would go into infinite loop. Check back in an hour and you're fine. It's a disaster and at times like these I am so glad there's at least some competition I can go to for search.

That would make sense, Google can easily track you if you always use the same IP. It's their business, they track you and sell your data so they can provide their product for "free".

> Google sometimes blocks me from searching using Firefox, saying it’s “suspicious activity” and sending me into captcha hell that always rejects my results after several screens for no reason.

That happend to me only when using tor.

that happens to me all the time, i have no idea why. i'm using firefox.

Use private mode exclusively. You will start getting into the captcha hell in a day or two.

I configured Firefox to delete all cookies on exit, except few whitelisted sites. So most of the time I have to accept Google privacy policy if I search there. Other than that, I never got into the captcha hell when trying to do a Google Search.

There are some sites I can't login at all unless I change the browser. SoundCloud is one of them.

Could be that IP Address/ISP reputation is also a factor for the variation in results.

In the same vein, check out what Bing did when I searched for "Firefox" with Edge[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187

Any reason as to why they might be doing that? VPN? "resist fingerprint" setting? School/public wifi network?

Usually when they do that its because you are on the same network that a lot of abuse has come from.

Is it possible that your requests are coming from an IP address that google has flagged for previous abuse? I think that the "suspicious activity" captcha hell is triggered by a high request volume from multiple not-logged-in agents on the same IP. At least that's been my experience in the past.

Doesn't have to be not logged-in. Years ago I use Chrome (with myself logged into Google) to search for very specific queries, so I have to use multiple operators (double quotes, "site", "filetype") in one search to narrow the result. I was hit with CAPTCHA as soon as I browse to page 2 of the result. This happens many times, so I have to do this kind of search at different times to make sure it doesn't see me a heavy traffic at any point.

We used to have this happen at an office I worked in where the SEO team was scraping google search rankings by running thousands of queries with different search keywords. Google was blocking the IP address rather than our browsers.

Sounds like your browser (or a plugin) might be blocking some cookie or connection that Google uses for security?

fake your browser header to a chrome variant.

That doesn't get rid of the problem, it only prolongs it.

The header isn't the only thing that identifies a browser.

A faked header might look even more suspicious to their algorithm?

Hanlon's razor applies here, though.

No it doesn't, rockefeller's razor applies - don't attribute to stupidity what could be adequately explained by profit motive.

There is no such razor.

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