[BUGS] Google captcha

[Trevor Roydhouse]

Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 08, 2008 at 10:42:51PM +1100, jonathan michaels wrote:
>> well i've been refused access to *google again (captcha thingies
>> and i cannot read teh bloody images, sorry i am annoyed)  
> 
> I've never seen a captcha in my years of searching using Google.

I have - it only started in the last few months for me and only at work 
- to prevent automated searches using their engine. I suspect that they 
treat the university web proxy as a single/suspect user when in fact it 
serves multiple campuses as well as various university research centres.

I also have had trouble deciphering the code I need to type in as it 
very obfuscated amongst a multi-coloured, textured background and 
stylised characters.

The ironic thing is that Google is itself a major automated bandwidth 
sucker with up to 20 googlebots concurrently crawling our site at work 
every day. Googlebots that also regularly ignore our robots.txt file - 
but when we had them in a couple of months ago (they were, 
unsuccessfully, wanting permission to make our privacy restricted 
material available for searching - they already have it of course) they 
categorically denied that this was possible.

-- 
Trevor Roydhouse                            Mob  : 0415-448-273
BJuris, LLB, LLM (UNSW)
System Developer
Australasian Legal Information Institute    Web  : www.austlii.edu.au