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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?"
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?"
Nonsense. I use a VPN most of the time so I encounter these captchas tens of times every day. The image based chaptchas are far easier to solve and take much less time to solve than the old text based chaptchas (where you'd be completly unable to read the text and fail 90% of the time).
The image based chaptchas take literally a couple of seconds. The only one that's slightly annoying is the one where new images appear after you click, but even those only take five to ten seconds to solve.
I also disagree with your assumption that computers would be more likely to solve these captchas than humans. The image based captchas are very easy for humans, but would be a nightmare to solve programatically.
I can only assume that the people who have rated your post 4, Informative (at current) havne't actually experienced these captchas themselves. I've probably solved thousands of them and they're extremely easy. They're a huge improvement over the old text captchas, which probably were easy for computers but very difficult for humans.