Google Scholar Users Report Badly Malfunctioning Captcha (google.com)

Google's search engine for academic research materials is blocking many users with a malfunctioning captcha screen, according to complaints on a Google help forum. "I'm a doctoral student and a professor, which means I use this extensively. Now I'm blocked from using it at all, even after answering all of the stupid image questions (3 times)," reads a typical complaint.

Heart44 writes: A lot of researchers when using Google Scholar are being asked to prove they are not a robot. You have to find all the rivers (but not the sea or lakes) or all street numbers (but not other numbers) or all the store fronts from nine poor quality images, sometimes more than once and, surprise, you will fail more than two thirds of the time and then just get an error 400 "Malformed request, that's all we know". You are offered an audio challenge but clicking on that simply loads more pictures... Is that the best they can do distinguishing between man and machine?
One post ended by stating succinctly "I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time. How do I stop it?"

Comments

It finally happened

[Calydor]

We have finally reached the point where captchas have gotten so convoluted that computers are more likely to get the answer right than humans are.

Well done, Google.

Re:It finally happened

[Applehu Akbar]

The problem with these match-the-image-type CAPTCHAs is the tiny, poor-quality images.

Just happened to me

[zuki]

Weird and coincidental.

While trying to do a simple URL shortening, I got some challenges that I couldn't understand using Safari (OS-X) because the questions themselves wouldn't display, just the images. Then it took me through at least four consecutive audio challenges. Looks like someone dun goofed.

Re: "I'm a doctoral student and a professor..."

[Heart44]

To answer your question why we rely on Google's toys? There are three main ways to find medical scientific content - Web of Science, PubMed and Google Scholar - there may be others, feel free to add them. PubMed has the advantage that searches are repeatable, unlike Google which is useful when you want an audit trail. Most of the time you want to find the most relevant publications and Google weighs them by citation count and other metrics.

That is a very imperfect measure but it is a lot better than PubMed where you get the newest publications (many may never get cited) first.

You save a ton of time with Google scholar and the search results have lots of useful links - you can specify a link to your university library, you can clean citations and you can directly load (very imperfect but a lot better than nothing) citations into your citation manager.

Being locked out of all this is a pain.

This is Google's main problem...

[Chas]

Basically, most of their services are run like "projects".

And there's nearly zero accountability and no real person can be contacted to light a fire under someone's ass to fix things when they go seriously wrong.

So things that break, tend to stay broken unless someone (or many someones) go to extravagant lengths

My company was on Google's StopBadware list for over a year for providing a passworded and checksummed remote support client from TeamViewer so our less technically inclined clients could safely download a known-good client and wouldn't be expected to jump through hoops to get it working.

Apparently, that's baaaaaaad! Because somehow a tech support scammer could direct someone to our site and abuse the client. Never mind that they couldn't get the password.

Or some bad, bad person would somehow break into our FTP site and swap out the file for a corrupted one.
Never mind that we have processes in place to alert us immediately that something like this has happened.

And it took a fucking YEAR to finally get a response about this from the insipid fucktards. Because all their stupid site told us was our site was somehow compromised. Never mind that we took it down and reloaded clean TWICE, changing passwords, databases, etc all around.

Because questions to their google hangout board or whatever the fuck it was received no response. On multiple occasions.
It finally took some asshole making some deeply targeted calls both to Google and the university that apparently oversees the project for them to actually respond and tell us the actual reason.