If you use advanced search features say 10 times in 10 minutes or whatever (a reasonable amount when refining a search if you ask me), you're quite liable to be elected to have a trial of endurance against the "prove you are a human" feature, having to solve multiple (my record is 16) consecutive "select all images that contain BLAH" tests.

> having to solve multiple

Do you use adblock? I find if adblock is enabled when doing captchas I have to keep clicking pictures over and over.

I had to solve thousands of captchas as part of the yahoo groups archiving project. You only have to choose four of the images, whatever the test is, and it's not really precise, so you can make small mistakes and it still will let you pass.

You have to solve a bunch of captchas if your searches are obscure or frequent enough.

I recognise this as well. I write for a living. So I'll do lots of searches to cross check stuff. But if you search to quickly, or to 'weirdly', or whatever you'll have to pick out bridges or zebra's or whatever is the current fashion in Captcha.

the best one is "select the photograph containing a crosswalk". How am I supposed to know what a crosswalk looks like in each & every culture on earth?

I mean, as a human, you are expected to use context clues.

You don’t need to know the markings used for crosswalks in every place around the world to know what a crosswalk looks like based on its purpose. There’s only so many ways to create a pedestrian crossing across a street, after all.

If anything, that seems like an extremely appropriate choice for something attempting to restrict access for bots that wouldn’t necessarily be able to act on the same context clues and intuition.

This doesn't really cross cultural boundaries. For example, the skull and crossbones means nothing to Iraqis despite universally being seen as as sign of danger and caution in US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Iraq_poison_grain_disaste...

What cultural boundaries are there to cross?

You're asked to point out the designated crossing area for pedestrians across a street. Sure, some places use crosswalk stripes perpendicular to the street, others use squiggles, others use lines on the sides, and some don't use any markings at all, but it should be plainly obvious to anyone, anywhere in the world where the designated area is based on there being some marking, or control devices, or literally people walking in the photo.

This isn't rocket science. Using contextual clues to figure something out is literally one of the most basic human abilities.

I share your frustration but I’ve come to learn that a lot of people don’t process things contextually and have an extremely difficult time with problems or reading that require picking up context clues.

Captcha has always been very US-centric for obvious reasons. I can see somebody less "open-minded" easily fail some of these tasks.

Or even what a crosswalk is.

It's a 'pedestrian crossing' everywhere else English is used - including the Geneva Convention.

I assume you don't have to answer correctly on the crosswalk question, you just have to answer the way most humans answer the question when asked... but I have nothing to back that up.

I'm not sure. It used to be that you could just select whatever as long as you do it with a mouse (so have human-like cursor movement). But latetly reCaptcha and hCaptcha have both been yelling loudly every time I didn't select one square that had a car or staircase or whatever it makes your look for even if that object is relatively small and easy to miss.

I think this is because the primary purpose of the excersise is AI training though.

FWIW I have found audio captchas much less annoying and time-consuming. For Google's captchas, click the headphones symbol.

If your activity seems automated in some way, Google will give you a captcha and sometimes it'll give you one on every search even after you've completed one captcha. But the reason for this is probably a combination of IP usage (e.g. a VPN IP shared between users), browser anonymity, and how specific you're getting with your search results, and not just the fact that you've done 20 searches today with "site:".

If you search page 3 and beyond of the results. Well, when it had pages of results instead of shitty infinite scroll.

AFAIK infinite scroll is still in the A/B testing phase. At least with clean browser profiles it seems random which one I get.

It's the height of irony that automated processing produced the AI chatbots that are vogue today, but if your activity is automated, Google considers it a crime. I say irony but that implies the hypocrisy was surprising.

>> CAPTCHA-hellban you get if you use "site:" in anything more than a tiny amount

> Please explain this point.

If Google thinks your searches are unusual, it will force you to answer captchas to see the results. They assume anyone using advanced features must be trying to abuse their service.

Are you abusing them, or are they using the captcha to get you to change your behavior back to something they prefer

> Are you abusing them, or are they using the captcha to get you to change your behavior back to something they prefer

No, I think they just don't care if they throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I do mostly "normal" searches and I get one captcha challenge a couple times a day.

I do use my own VPN, so maybe my IP is flagged or something.