Yep. If you move around in google faster than "normal" humans it's flagging that behaviour more lately. I suspect some malicious (i.e. made by content thieves) web scraping instrumentation frameworks have added more natural human behaviours to their capabilities but still operate at a higher-than-"normal human" rate and those of us who are highly adept at legitimately utilizing google now fit into that new classifier slot. It's been super annoying.
It likely has to do with your IP address. Two possibilities that I can think of:
1) You are all on a VPN that's hosted at AWS or another cloud provider. Google assumes you to be a bot based on the IP address being in a data center.
2) Someone is doing a lot of scraping through a computer in the office, which triggered Google to flag your office IP address for bots (which in this case would technically be correct)
I have my browser set to delete all cookies every time I close it. I've been doing this for years but lately, every time I decide to alter my search settings, I get a Captcha. I have tested this at work and it does the same thing there.
I suspect that this is intentional and a way to punish people who are trying to avoid tracking cookies.
Google doesn't even trust itself. My VPN is hosted on GCP and I get these regularly. Sometimes the header is missing and I have to guess which item I'm trying to select.
Its all nice for generic searches, but whenever I try to pin down something that I know exists but can't find anymore they start throwing captchas at me.
And I never find what I am looking for.
This happens when you use a VPN but also occurred to me from time to time when just searching lots of things really fast...
Also: It's utterly frustrating to pick cars, front-end stores, bridges etc. The process is also slow as hell. Worst UX ever for a problem that's really not mine but actually theirs.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 39.0 ms ] threadWhenever I channeled my traffic through my own VPN (Digital Ocean), I would get the "Are you a robot?" screen very often (at least hourly).
1) You are all on a VPN that's hosted at AWS or another cloud provider. Google assumes you to be a bot based on the IP address being in a data center.
2) Someone is doing a lot of scraping through a computer in the office, which triggered Google to flag your office IP address for bots (which in this case would technically be correct)
If not try with a turing test.
I suspect that this is intentional and a way to punish people who are trying to avoid tracking cookies.
Also: It's utterly frustrating to pick cars, front-end stores, bridges etc. The process is also slow as hell. Worst UX ever for a problem that's really not mine but actually theirs.