Google got way more aggressive in the past week for me. I've had to deal with the occasional captcha when I go to make a search (I saw speculation that google does this to punish you if you try to avoid their spying bullshit, I use Firefox with all the privacy settings, plus VPN, plus private mode always) but a few days ago it turned into a captcha for every single search and eventually it got to the point where they were impossible. Some of them were so distorted you couldn't make anything out so you fail, or it would be like "select every image with a bicycle" and when you do it still fails you. So I had to switch to duck duck go, which somehow produces worse search results than Google
Google started doing this to me as soon as I started using a VPN on a decade+ old account. That was late 2022. It recently started to be less common but the first few months of using a VPN it was every search. I mostly use DuckDuckGo now.
Google got way more aggressive in the past week for me. I've had to deal with the occasional captcha when I go to make a search (I saw speculation that google does this to punish you if you try to avoid their spying bullshit, I use Firefox with all the privacy settings, plus VPN, plus private mode always) but a few days ago it turned into a captcha for every single search and eventually it got to the point where they were impossible. Some of them were so distorted you couldn't make anything out so you fail, or it would be like "select every image with a bicycle" and when you do it still fails you. So I had to switch to duck duck go, which somehow produces worse search results than Google
Google started doing this to me as soon as I started using a VPN on a decade+ old account. That was late 2022. It recently started to be less common but the first few months of using a VPN it was every search. I mostly use DuckDuckGo now.
Startpage uses Google as source and has no captcha bullshit.
While for dev purposes, bing is the best search engine right now.