With that in mind, what services are good at finding local places? I figure services like Yelp and Groupon had this in mind, but generally attract the people who have negative experiences or opinions to share them.

I discount any Yelp review that's 1 or 5 stars. Tends to have good results.

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.

> The site thought you were a bot

Based on what? It assumes the same for me. There's zero information anywhere. When does it assume you're a human?

When I was logged in Google (I usually am), it didn't ask me to solve a captcha. When I tried from a private browser, it did.

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.

That's better than "everyone is a bot" though.