Google's heuristics recently seem to be in overdrive when I tether using the same data plan I've been using for years, to the point that I often have to spend *literally 40 seconds* on a captcha to do a no-AI search in Incognito.

Something feels off when big tech LLMs are allowed to slurp everything up but I get treated like a bot. 🙄

It's not lost on me that the obvious solution here is "let Google track all my searches by default". Which, … no. I'm not giving up on data hygiene best practices.

I'll die on that hill, or at least switch search engines.

@lgarron Google is doing something analogous with email: small servers can't prove they are legitimate, so their messages get rejected, which drives their users to GMail.

@aarbrk oya, I've read enough horror stories. I pay for G Suite almost entirely because it ensures my domain emails are secured and not black-holed. 😣

(And of course they're raising prices on that by forcing and up-charge for LLM I will never use.)

@lgarron Happy to report that Fastmail is working out for me so far. We'll see....
@lgarron I get a captcha on desktop sometimes, even logged in with cookies. Especially when I'm doing multiple searches on technical topics that aren't returning what I'm looking for. (Also over IPv6, which I'm not sure is related or not.) Not usually 40 seconds unless in incognito mode, though.