Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#1

Post by longcommonname » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

Is anybody else experience this, asked around in a few slack chats and coworkers and they are all going through this.

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#2

Post by davelnewton » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

Are you a robot?

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#3

Post by longcommonname » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

davelnewton wrote: post #2

Are you a robot?

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#4

Post by debacle » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

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).

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#5

Post by hrbrmstr » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#6

Post by chadash » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

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)

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#7

Post by is_true » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

chadash wrote: post #6

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)

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

If not try with a turing test.

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#8

Post by Crontab » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 10:15 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#9

Post by testb » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 6:42 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Google repeatedly thinks I'm a robot

#10

Post by O_H_E » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

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.