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.

"Do you know who I am???"

[Zanadou]

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.

Re:"Do you know who I am???"

[eric31415927]

A student writing a final exam in large room goes over on time.
When approaching the front of the room to hand in the exam, a proctor informs the student that the exam is late and cannot be accepted.
The student says: "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" to import some great significance.
The proctor answers "No," as if he did not care.
At which point, the student quickly thrusts his exam into the middle of the pile on the desk and runs away.

Why?

[Ark42]

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?

EditorDavid did a good job here

[Heart44]

He really improved my submission. He RTFA and made the submission more accessible. Thanks.

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.

Re:This is Google's main problem...

[Richard_J_N]

I completely agree. I had a problem where our new company couldn't send email to Gmail users without always being flagged as spam. We were doing absolutely everything right - and there is no way to get hold of Google. I did finally, 6 months later find a way to reach a person at Google (via a back channel as a customer of a different company), and they confirmed to me: Google act as judge, jury, and executioner, in a secret trial; you can't see the evidence, you don't even know if you've been condemned, and there is no appeal. And they are fine with that.
For what it's worth, the problem was that the previous owners of our IP had got it into a secret blacklist (internal to Google), although we were clean on all of the hundreds of public blacklists I searched. Google are a menace to the public infrastructure. Even AOL behave better!

Re:I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional,

[R3d M3rcury]

"I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional!"
"That's what all the robots say..."