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A comment on Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF?. Parent comment

Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by nohuck13 on Monday June 05, 2023 @09:48AM (#36196162)
"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.

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by Hard_Space on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:11AM (#36196412)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by raverbashing on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:25AM (#36196597)
So now anyone displaying slightly more intelligence than an eggplant while doing a search in Google is a "bot"?

Appalling

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by freedomben on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:15AM (#36197388)
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.

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by pixl97 on Monday June 05, 2023 @01:01PM (#36199341)
>As a person who has been a statistical outlier most of my life

Anomaly detected. Termination authorized.

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by CatWChainsaw on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @09:36AM (#36226626)
All humans must be reduced to sameness so machine successors can flourish.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by brazzledazzle on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:19AM (#36197470)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by 29083011397778 on Monday June 05, 2023 @12:25PM (#36198686)
Appalling what that says about Google, or what that says about the average search user?
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by Atlas22 on Monday June 05, 2023 @12:48PM (#36199100)
C) All of the above
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by chefandy on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:30AM (#36197689)
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?
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by Hard_Space on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:51AM (#36228472)
> VPN, big proxy, or some other contributing factor?

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

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by chefandy on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @02:40PM (#36231403)
:: Google shaking its fist in the air ::

Damn Romanians!

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by Hard_Space on Thursday June 08, 2023 @03:08AM (#36238315)
> Damn Romanians!

Not even Romanian! (Brit transplant)

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by chefandy on Sunday June 11, 2023 @12:35PM (#36282867)
Everybody adopts the nationality of their IP address in internet land!
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by foobazgt on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:44AM (#36197960)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by buggyipadmettoo on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:08PM (#36207160)
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?
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by EvanAnderson on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:38AM (#36196772)
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...)
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by tyingq on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:08AM (#36196384)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by pteraspidomorph on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:02AM (#36196290)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by josephcsible on Monday June 05, 2023 @09:59AM (#36196257)
FWIW, I've personally experienced exactly that happening too.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by mavhc on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:23AM (#36196568)
bots use it to find websites with security flaws I assume
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by metalforever on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:13AM (#36197360)
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.

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by freedomben on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:16AM (#36197423)
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
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by metalforever on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:21AM (#36197509)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by Atlas22 on Monday June 05, 2023 @01:10PM (#36199486)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by privacyking on Monday June 05, 2023 @06:10PM (#36204695)
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.
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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by 20after4 on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:27AM (#36197636)
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.
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