I tried making a throwaway account on this site recently.

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 had this happen the other day too. I spent at least 5 minutes each going through 3 different captchas. The slow fade-in / fade-out thing was new and quite annoying. The images were also quite blurry as well.

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.

Google obviously just decided you were good at training its machine learning algs.

My hypothesis : Google always shows the captchas now, even when it knows that you're really not a robot because it knows you need its services and you'll probably solve them for free for up to a minute. Related post : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704960 (Ask HN: Do you think Google's recaptcha has gone greedy off late?)

I don't think you really got hellbanned, Google captchas have just become extremely buggy in recent months. Whenever I have to solve one it always takes me a few tries, sometimes a dozen or more, and I usually triple check whether I've actually selected all the traffic lights/bicycles/chimneys/whatevers before submitting...

(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'm inclined to go with your alternative hypothesis. The quality of the captcha response degrades the more times you solve it consecutively.

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.

It's both. The more consecutive CAPTCHAs you solve in a short period, the more likely Google is to assume you're not a human (or not up to any good), but you definitely can get google browsing identity (however they tag you as a combination of IP, browser fingerprint, etc) to the point that they won't every consider enough responses a good indicator. I've done it many times, and yes, it usually is fixed within a few hours or the next day.

I agree that a heuristic (machine learning or otherwise) designed to prevent spam was almost certainly the culprit. I disagree with the notion that this does not constitute a hellban, but I'm open to considering alternative nomenclature.

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 may be a ban or an errorban, but it's not a hellban, in any sense of what "hell" means in "hellban:: https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/

It also might just be a broken integration with recaptcha.

It's ironic that this comment saying about "hellbanning" was "autodead", and I had to "vouch" to revive it.

I wonder if it hit some automatic filter by virtue of being new, and talking about banning/hellbanning?

I find I can often get away with throwing in a wrong answer or two.

It's probably similar to old recaptcha where they give you a selection of known answers and a couple of unknowns which they're uncertain of. Probably known not-correct answers too so that the system works.

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

Why not just use a different search engine? Was the library that much easier in this case?

Google search wasn't the product being gatekept by google's captcha.

This is the main reason I use DuckDuckGo now. I was something of a Google power user and they kept sending me on endless captcha safaris.

Bye Google.

I just think these captchas are broken in Chrome.

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.

I still browse at the library myself occasionally, but ... ddg? Bing? Startpage? Searx?

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.

> 20 minutes later, I gave up and drove to the library (!).

Assuming it's traditional Google search from your ISP, there other alternatives such as using startpage.com or Tor.

That's assuming you didn't read OC reply to the same comment above.

Tor is even worse (think of everyone else who uses it...)

Yep Recaptcha bans work like that, they don't actually tell you they are never going to let you proceed, they just let waste your time thinking that they will, while profiting off you.

Its a perfect example of passive aggressive dysfunctionality when it comes to big tech.

They shouldn't have this power

Google's recaptcha became cancer and I really wish companies would stop using it (I think that they are trying to block everyone who still uses a PC). The other day I wasn't even able to create a new reddit account because of it.

I read this can happen if you are using anti-fingerprinting privacy browser extensions (CanvasBlocker possibly?)

Why not just use DuckDuckGo or other search engines?

oh is that what it was? I've had that many many times in recent days