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Comment by nohuck13 | Hacker News Reader

"Add to that the automatic CAPTCHA-hellban you get if you use "site:" in anything more than a tiny amount"

Source? This would be worrisome.

Anecdata, but I can confirm a uniform and long-standing experience that adding colon-based operators to a search query results in a CAPTCHA challenge every single time on a subsequent search, even if the subsequent search is 'vanilla' (i.e., no operators). Has been like this more years now than I can remember. Apparently this kind of 'advanced' usage is indication of bot activity.

So now anyone displaying slightly more intelligence than an eggplant while doing a search in Google is a "bot"?

Appalling

welcome to the machine learning future, where anything you do that is a statistical outlier gets you algorithmed by a machine that is incapable of reason but knows when you're different.

As a person who has been a statistical outlier most of my life, I am dreading this. It's bad enough dealing with human impressions and mis-judgment, but now we get it from our computers now, which used to be logical, deterministic havens.

>As a person who has been a statistical outlier most of my life

Anomaly detected. Termination authorized.

All humans must be reduced to sameness so machine successors can flourish.

For what it’s worth this never, ever happens to me. These days I only get captcha’d when someone’s laptop on the same network gets owned and is being used to hit google.

Appalling what that says about Google, or what that says about the average search user?

C) All of the above

Hmm... VPN, big proxy, or some other contributing factor? I use site: all the time, not on chrome, and without being logged in... If I've ever gotten captchas doing so, it wasn't frequently enough to see a pattern. Maybe some property of the site makes a difference that puts your usage and my usage on either side of that fence?

> VPN, big proxy, or some other contributing factor?

My big crime is that I live in Romania, I think.

:: Google shaking its fist in the air ::

Damn Romanians!

> Damn Romanians!

Not even Romanian! (Brit transplant)

Everybody adopts the nationality of their IP address in internet land!

I have never had this experience once in... decades? I use operators such as site: frequently. I suggest there's some other property of your environment that's setting captcha off - vpn, shared sketchy ip/network, etc. Bad actors suck.

Same. Use it everyday for majority of my G searches, never once seen a captcha (except when using VPN). OP, are you logged in to google? I am. Wonder if that’s the difference?

Anecdotal, but this happens to me a lot, and not just with the "site:" operator. Generally using any of the advanced operators seems to set it off. Things like inurl:, intitle:, etc, trigger it also. Not every time, but after a few times. From a normal ISP connection, no VPN, even while logged into Google, etc.

I personally have been surprised to find myself CAPTCHA'd out of google search recently. No idea what's up with that. Regular commercial ISP, no VPNs.

I've never gotten a CAPTCHA-hellban that I know if, but I absolutely get a CAPTCHA when I use "site:" for more than just a couple searches. (It sounds par-for-the-course w/ Google, though...)

FWIW, I've personally experienced exactly that happening too.

Yeah, I get these. The problem is that the Captchas take forever to fill out (like 5 minutes of challenges). But the worse part is that the captchas are asking for wrong answers. It tells you to select scooter and there's no scooter in the photo but it thinks there is. So you just end up stuck in a captcha loop for a long time.

I am not sure why I get them but it might be due to using anti-fingerprinting tools.

I've wondered if it isn't intentionally impossible to solve, because "the algorithm" decided that you're a bot or malicious and they want to spin your cycles endlessly. The affect on me know is I won't even try anymore, I'll just take a different route. That may even reinforcement teach the system that I was a bot that couldn't solve it

I think it's more malicious than that. They know I use privacy tools and can't be tracked -> they can't make money on me -> bully me into not using their service.

It may also be part of their anticompetitive war on other browsers. I get captchas constantly in a new default Firefox profile, but not in a new default chrome profile. Spoofing user agent to recent chrome agent in Firefox makes the captchas happen far less often for me.

I sometimes get multiple captchas in a row that I fill correctly but they keep on showing more..I then just do the audio one which works.

This is probably the common thread among all the people reporting this. As an alternate date point, I haven't experienced the captcha from using advanced search queries.

bots use it to find websites with security flaws I assume

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