Uh Oh! Google’s CAPTCHA Doesn’t Work!
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Oh look what I found. Google’s CAPTCHA doesn’t work properly. Wait. Do you think I’m joking? Do you? Well I’m gonna prove it!
Okay head over to www.google.com/addurl and enter a random URL. But, don’t enter the CAPTCHA correctly. Just type something random there. What do you get? Well I get this message:
Thank you
Your site URL has been successfully added to our list of URLs to crawl. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
Can they not afford a decent programmer? Damn! What kind of lazy (and dumb) bastards are they hiring? See that’s why you shouldn’t treat your employees like a king. Don’t give them toys, free food and other luxuries. Make them work their ass off!
I’m sure this is how the conversation about the CAPTCHA over at Google went:
Manager (or whatever they call the guy): Are the captures working?
Programmer: Yes they are. I just finished making them yesterday. They are the best CAPTCHAs on the web.
Manager: Good! Google must have the best of everything! May I test it?
Programmer: Sure. Just enter the letters you see in the picture.
Manager: Good. It works perfect. You can go play with everyone now.
Dude you gotta try it the other way too! Enter a wrong CAPTCHA. Oh man, this is just hilarious. Well Google I work freelance and I’m free right now. Feel free to drop me an email. I can fix that for you guys. Ha! You wish. I was joking. I’m not helping you guys.
Okay spammers its your time to have some fun with the big G. Big G? What’s it stand for again? Gangsta? More like ghetto right now. Oh well. Let me know if you did anything big.
Update: I just tried to contact Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam by commenting on his blog. I just wanted to tell him about this and I found something interesting (once again!). Mr Cutts has built is own custom spam protection. It asked me what the sum of 10 + 6 and I entered 16. It said I was wrong. (Hmm the head of spam can’t build a working spam protection.)
Update again: Okay the spam protection finally worked and I could leave the comment on his blog. Well he deleted my comment. I guess he was too ashamed of his and Google’s epic failure at making a simple CAPTCHA.
Update #3: Matt Cutts is saying that they do this on purpose. But, when I asked him why they do this he didn’t have an answer. Very convincing I must say. I wonder if he’s just saying because he doesn’t want him and Google to look like a total loser. Hmm?
Sorry don’t mean to ruin it for them, but there are bots that can read and enter CAPTCHAs. So, people who make a mistake while entering the CAPTCHA is considered a bot? And their submission is just thrown away? And the bots that can correctly enter the CAPTCHA gets added to the list? What a brilliant idea!
I wonder if I’ll find the CAPTCHA working correctly if I go there next week (or when we all forget about this). I’m thinking yes.
Update #4: This was submitted to Digg and it was going pretty good. It was second in Industry New’s upcoming with most diggs. But, suddenly it just went poof! It got buried. How is that possible? Just like that? And it was only 1 bury that buried the whole story. Was it by a moderator?
Do you think Google contacted Digg and told them to make sure that this doesn’t go front page? Or is this some kind of Digg censorship? I’ve heard stories of Digg censoring things out. Oh and Google is also dropping me from SERPs. Do a Google search for webrampage and you’ll see. Coincidence?
15 August 2008 at 11:10 am
It has always been that way. They do it to see which submissions are done automatically and which are manual. Manual submissions enter the code.
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th13rteen Reply:
August 15th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I don’t think you’re right. There are bots that can enter CAPTCHAs and we make mistakes too when we’re entering a CAPTCHA. So, how does that work?
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15 August 2008 at 4:04 pm
I think the idea is, if a robot gets the thing wrong, it is told that it has got it right.
People really should start using reCAPTCHA. It’s the best, since it’s all done manually—see http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=129
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th13rteen Reply:
August 15th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
If that’s the case then what about humans? Plus if they were trying to trick bots then Matt Cutts wouldn’t be so embarrassed about this and quickly delete my comment on his blog.
And they could just make a CAPTCHA which bots can’t read. Now I’m just waiting to see if they fix this.
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16 August 2008 at 1:11 am
It even says it above the CAHTCHA:
To help us distinguish hand-submitted URLs from automatically submitted URLs, enter the word as it is shown in the box below:
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16 August 2008 at 3:01 pm
@ Matt: They do it to see which one are done manually or automatically? They would produce very innacurate results, as it doesn’t consider humans that don’t type it correctly nor does it consider bots who are able to enter captcha correctly.
To me, it just looks like a cover-up just to not admit that google failed there.
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16 August 2008 at 3:05 pm
Google will not fail at programming. It has been like that for months, probably years. If a user enters the code then its a manual submission. Granted I have submitted sites and not entered the code, its up to them how they collect data and how accurate it is.
With the amount of money that Google have to invest a form like is not going to be a failure.
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th13rteen Reply:
August 16th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
First of all, are you actually Matt Cutts or a Google rep? I’m just wondering.
Well I’m sorry to tell you this, but Google has already failed at making a simple CAPTCHA. We call it an “epic fail”.
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16 August 2008 at 3:18 pm
Just seeing update three, the non CAPTCHA entries are not lost, they are still submitted, but I would guess they are marked as automatic submissions and not manual.
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16 August 2008 at 3:50 pm
One reason for this could be so bots and spammers think their submission was actually added. It isn’t good practice I’ll agree. If you’re human and mis-type the letters and theres no error, you will assume it’s added even though it’s not.
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16 August 2008 at 4:01 pm
@ Alex: Don’t believe what Matt is saying. Google is obviously trying to cover this up. Well think about it. Does it even make sense? And its not a small site. It’s Google. Why would they do something like this when they can come up with a smarter and efficient way.
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16 August 2008 at 5:14 pm
lol, no i don’t represent Google, I just don’t understand why you are talking rubbish when it clearly says why it operates the way it does on the site itself
If they wanted it to work a certain way they would change it.
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17 August 2008 at 1:09 am
wow, you sound like quite a jerk in this article. It isn’t that huge of a deal. I mean, sure it’s great if you want to googlebomb something.
Who cares about the captcha anyways? You can actually avoid it entirely, and skip that page.
You could have taken it like the security researcher approach, where you approach them more formally and tell them nicely that they have a problem. This article sounds like it was rushed so it can be added to digg quickly.
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17 August 2008 at 1:16 am
Lol maybe they should Hire me, I just made a CAPTCHA script yesterday. How about $1000/an hour?
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17 August 2008 at 1:27 am
@ Pirate: Thank you. One of my specialties is being a jerk lol. So, why didn’t I take the security researcher approach like you mentioned? Well all those high-paid monkeys over at Google should be able to figure out that its a security issue. It’s a bit of common sense I would say.
Maybe Tyler can sit down and train those “experts” at Google, huh? Oh and no, I didn’t rush anything for a digg. I didn’t even submit it to Digg.
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