Solved Bing using CAPTCHA?

[stevieray]

A few days ago I needed to download a new copy of Thunderbird, so I entered it into Bing. The weird thing is, Bing wouldn't search for it until I passed a CAPTCHA test! I never saw that before... is that new? Why would Bing do that... to stop bots from gaming the search results?

 

[Dwarf]

Unusual. I've never heard of this before. True, I've had to enter CAPTCHAs when downloading motherboard manuals and the like when helping others on the Forums (and only from certain manufacturers), but never in a search engine. I've just tried the request in Bing, and it searched straight away.

 

[drakeshe]

I know of that Google, if too many searches are coming from an IP (This happens at work quite often) then it will ask the user for validation to prevent bots.

 

[rover3500]

If u r using a proxy,It's done it to me loads of times if it thinks ur ip is suspicious.If it's the same ip u always use in bing,I have no idea.

 

[Qdos]

Google.co.uk often does that if I'm accessing it from a Russian IP address (work will take me there you see...) and, in fact, there are days Google won't serve at all due to something spooking it seriously badly...

 

[stevieray]

Interesting! So other folks have seen this before.

It was the same day as the Bing outage, so maybe it was a related glitch, or perhaps there was a run on Thunderbird recently. I'm not using a proxy, nor was this done from an office w/ multiple users, so I don't think it was triggered by something on my end (although you never know what your cable company could be doing behind the scenes...)

I just hope this wasn't a test of some kind of future feature... a random CAPTCHA-to-rule-out-bots feature would be a serious PITA.

 

[Qdos]

Maybe, just maybe... this might explain matters...

 

[stevieray]

Maybe, just maybe... this might explain matters...

That's what I'm thinkin'... perhaps a trial CAPTCHA thingy temporarily escaped from an internal test and ran free on Bing for while.