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Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com

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Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it's frankly very insulting and rather disturbing that they think someone who inputs "unusual" search queries, according to their measure, is not human. Insulting? how is that insulting? You are entitled. You are entitled you block scripts, use Google's FREE service to perform any search query to search the web while blocking any program that attempts to identify you as not a bot. But if while using their free…

Google's services are not free. You trade your data, screen real estate, and attention for their service. This is worth a lot - Google is worth a lot. They didn't do it by giving out services for free.

My real estate and attention are given to them because I came to their service asking to fill my screen according to my query.

I can agree Google is not providing a free pure-search-results service, but they do provide a free search results + ads service. Whether getting relevant results + [relevant] ads is a worth anything to you - even $0 - is a separate question, but it's a stretch to frame as an exchange. It's like taking a free hot dog and complaining it's not free because you traded your time & taste buds eating the bun while you only wanted the sausage... [I'd buy it more for e.g. youtube pre-video ads, where you are forced to give attention and time to the ad first.]

Now my data is a better point. Very valid for the totality of google services; quite weak for logged-out search use. If you work answering questions, and recording the questions that get asked and where they came from, then yes I did hand you this data but it's almost inherent in asking the question.

[Disclaimer: I'm a xoogler. And all this is nit-picking.]

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#442
post #23

It seems plausible that as more sites adopt this kind of technology, automated web access (e.g. scraping) the web will become harder -- for whatever purpose, good or ill. This has long been an "arms race" between hiding and detection. I can hope that reasonable uses of automation still remain feasible.

You're welcome as long as you're respectful. Just use a bot with a clear User Agent, not "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/36.0.1985.57 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53". And, don't forget to start by reading my /robots.txt. If you behave yourself and abide by the rules, why should I ban your bot? If for whatever reason I don't want to allow your bot in, you mi…

This comment seems like a non-sequitur. My comment had nothing to do with a particular site, much less "your" site.

I was making a general comment about automation and detection. If the detection gets better than the automation, it could change the dynamic. There is no fixed rule that says that content providers will or will not allow scraping based on robots.txt or other guidelines. Some could elect to disallow any/all robot behavior, if they have the capability.

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