Could this be a geolocation thing? I'm in the UK here and I see a picture of a cat, and two buttons, one of which is to redirect to the old recaptcha website, the other is a useless "sign up for more information", and there is no actual information on the page.
It sounds like others are seeing something different however?
The site thought you were a bot (probably because you were browsing privately), so rather than assuming you are a human, it decided to challenge you traditionally.
So google-users are non-bots and non-googlers are bots? That sounds extremely poor. Especially considering you solved a captcha to create that same google account.
In 99% of cases, whether or not you're a bot can be determined before you interact with the box. It's mostly just a vector to download the script that does the actual detection based on mouse and keyboard patterns while you're using the rest of the page.
They absolutely can. This is what bot developers did in Runescape after Jagex implemented the same system. It blocked bots for a few months, but after that it was pretty much useless.
By now the helping-out-with-OCR part of ReCaptcha is entirely unrelated to the actual captcha. In some cases now you're just identifying street numbers for Google Maps.
If captchas got simpler, you could still do Mechanical Turk jobs if you wanted to.
The easy house number tests are for users with established sessions because the system already has a high degree of confidence you are a human. Delete your cookies or use an incognito window and I expect you'd see the traditional captcha with two words.
It used to be there were two variables one that was uncertain to the machine and the other that was known. The known variable was used to ensure you weren't making up your answer.
But for at least a couple of months now I haven't seen a two variable captcha. I can only assume every captcha has been solved and verified to a reasonable degree of certainty. If Google, who is probably most able to benefit off of captcha solutions is willing to move past it I can't really argue with them.
I think a lot of the single-challenge CAPTCHAs they're using now are house numbers on Street View. Even if Google doesn't know the exact answer, they can rule out a lot of wrong answers (e.g, the number entered is on the wrong side of the street, or is completely out of range for the current block).
Also, if you look really suspicious (particularly if you fail an easier CAPTCHA, or ask for lots of challenges), Google will still give you one of the old two-scrambled-words CAPTCHAs. Except both of the words are ones they know the answers for, and you'll have to enter them both correctly to pass.
Do we get anything back for that?
I mean, millons of humans contribute to solving captchas, and does google give anything back (like the OCR tech they're developing) to the community, or does it end up as part of some propietary product of theirs?
