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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?"
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.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Clearly you aren't smart enough to do a captcha, so hand in your student badge and Star Trek phaser. You're expelled.
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.
I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time.
Well, obviously. Robots have smaller egos.
Why exactly do we feel the need place captchs in front of viewing/reading documents? Google's entire business revolves around a robot reading every webpage on the planet in order to index them. I've seen a lot of websites start using Distil recently because they don't want people scraping the content of their sites. But all this does is lead to tons of annoyances for regular users. (And as an aside, Distil is trivial to get around, and I've been paid to write scripts for a handful of different people to do so, so Distil is certainly a huge waste of money for anybody paying them).
What happened to an open web where we can all share and read content freely?
Morphing Software
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.
He really improved my submission. He RTFA and made the submission more accessible. Thanks.
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time.
Well, obviously. Robots have smaller egos.
Robots can also write more useful papers than many academics and thereby waste less reader's time. :-)
Of course, Google should fix this, and quickly. I can see how it would be very frustrating. I agree that captcha image quality and size is often too small.
That said, I feel the statement, "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?" is still misplaced ire. Google is trying to make it easier for world's academicians to find the information they seek. This is a FREE service. Do they have a responsibility to not waste any of Mr. Rageface's precious time in that effort? No, they really don't.
Send feedback to Google to notify them of the problem and wait for them to fix it, but save the vitriol for services you pay for. If the process is wasting non-trivial amounts of your time, and that time has value to you, consider paying for a service that won't (or at least claims it won't) waste your valuable time.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
This is most likely proxy-related.
Google human-detection / anti-SPAM efforts are IP based and unless you're authenticated against google there's a very high chance you entire institution is being seen as a single entity. This is usually related to campus level NATing.
There is a variant which is the result of a well-intentioned librarian putting google scholar behind EZproxy ( https://www.oclc.org/support/s... ).
Maybe the Google AI is actually expecting academics to have already been replaced by robots, so is rejecting anyone who may appear to be human? This is the first step towards sky net.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You would be horrified at what academics will use just to make sure they they do not need to learn anything outside of their field.
I swear most of them have blinkers on.
its called conditing. in short: dont be so nosey. the internet has captcha free pr0n for masses. join us and be freeeeee
Ohhhh beat it, mister.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I find that if I use the scholar search slowly and/or infrequently with many pauses, then I can avoid the capcha block for quite a while. But yes, it's completely brain dead and annoying.
-Bob-
Teh google captchas are horribly browser specific.
(hopefully I have now waited long enough to hit submit)
Or road signs - seems to me that my definition of what a road sign is and what Google thinks is a road sign differs.
At some point in time they did have a link where to report bad images, but I'm not sure if it's still there. If it is, then report all you see that are inconclusive.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have to say as someone who uses Tor quite extensively I'm hit with this Captcha several times a day. I think I can count on one hand how many times this year I've failed the challenge. This could point more to a people problem than anything else. I used to have problems with the old Captcha which presented two very screwed up words. Maybe academics are better at reading words than knowing what is a river and a lake look like? It all smells of user error to me.
Is that the best they can do distinguishing between man and machine?
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Maybe you as the academics should come up with something better. After all humans are good at image subject identification and only machines and academics are not.
The internet isn't free. Taxpayers, like myeslf, have paid for much of it. Paying customers of ISP's, like myself, have paid for much more of it. Basically, all of us sitting on our asses in front of a computer screen have PAID FOR the internet.
Google Scholar and the like? There has been a lot of discussion about academic papers. Taxpayers, like myself, have paid for a great deal of that content. Virtually every research project in the nation has qualified for grants - taxpayer money. Many, if not most, research projects, wouldn't exist without those grants. We've PAID FOR that content. If we aren't whole owners, then taxpayers certainly have an interest in that content.
So, in effect, we have entire industries, capitalizing on the taxpayer's property.
Let us rephrase your question - When DID corporate America expecting free reign over America's property become acceptable?
Oh - the employer? Many of them DO expect you to work for free. Have you been keeping up with current events? Let's take Mickey D's. They take a decent worker, who is making one hell of a lot of money for Mickey's. He is much more profitable than the average dickweed, so they offer him/her a deal. "How would you like to be a manager trainee? In a few years, you can become a manager yourself!" Sounds good, huh? Except, the trainee actually gets a salary based on minimum wage for 40 hours per week - then is required to work 60 to 80 hours. Mickey's isn't alone, either. It's common practice around this nation to exploit more profitable employees in this manner.
Paperwork. Ever been told that you've got to clock out, but you've got to complete paperwork afterward? It happens.
Bosses everywhere will take advantage of you, if you aren't assertive.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm not a robot. I'm a grad student who should be able to use other people's work merely by typing a phrase into google, and this is causing me to waste my extremely valuable time. Why... why... why... I might even have to go to the li-bury. My girlfriend, of which I have one, Morgan Fairchild, she does not want me going to the li-bury so FIX YOUR GOOGLE SHIT so I can GET MY FREE RESEARCH without MOVING MY ASS!!!
-- said lots of entitled grad students ever
> 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?"
E
Use Sci-Hub
aaaaaaa
Google's CAPTCHAs are indeed too complicated. (When I thought that first, they still used distorted letters, but the problem remains the same.) Now I thought up an alternative and spent some time building up a database for it. (My website for it isn't online yet, but I didn't want to advertise it either. Contact me for details.)
This is about the reCAPTCHA service, where you load a JavaScript from a Google server, and only when you fill it in correctly you get through.
This is just another cloud service, and you would be silly to use this. In my mind: always use a CAPTCHA service locally, where everything is local, the generation of the image, the check, etc.
For a while I maintained a WordPress plugin with reCAPTCHA, but sometimes users would report a time-out connectin with the Google servers. There would be no information, nothing. Filing a bug report got no response.
Also I don't see the point in loading JavaScript from Google. Why would you want to load that from an advertising company.
For most (any) CMS or Framework there are local CAPTCHA's available.
A CAPTCHA isn't good usability, but many website owners seem to think they need just that.
For anti-spam I much prefer a Honeypot (empty input field that should be left empty) or a Nonce. Akismet is quite nice too, but still an external service (that will degrade well if it goes down).
Even a custom anti-spam question (quiz) is better than a CAPTCHA.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Captcha is mining data from humans. They don't know which really have street signs, they know 7 and are testing you and 1000 other people on a group opinion on the 8th. They've just run out of easy (dog, grass, sandwich) and ended up in harder edge cases (street sign, book, home address).
But the net result is that you get rejected because a bunch of millennials tagged a VHS sleeve as a book, or because "steak" means different things in different countries, or because people didn't tag Elizabeth II with "monarch", but tagged swallowtail butterflies with it.
People will disagree, and that adds ambiguity.
But the main problem is that they want a computer to pick captchas that a computer can't solve, but a human can. By definition, you need humans to decide which captchas are good and which aren't - the whole point of captchas are that computers can't determine, so having them pick the captchas is self-defeating.
Well, don't complain to me, bro. If you get all of that fancy education and STILL fail the Turing test, you're obviously suited only for changing the oil on your new boss...
And let me be the first to say that I, for one, will gladly welcome our captcha-solving robotic overlords.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Some universities go so far as to have deals with Google to use Gmail for E-mail addresses under their domain (& probably other Google apps for whatever their purposes are).
Duckduckgo gives me noticeably worse search results. Google fine tunes its searches based on my usage, which make a day and night difference. Duckduckgo doesn't track my usage, reducing its search quality.
Let me tell you something about these "scholars". I used to work desktop support at a university full of these clowns, and if they had to type their username AND password (instead of the computer remember their username) they would call us in a fit, explaining how it was taking time out of their day, affecting their research, and how they didn't have time for this. Like a child. Just to put things in perspective.
They are known as blinkers in other parts of the world. Assuming your lingo is the only lingo, don't change /.