"And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM"
Do you mean using a DO VM as a VPN, or via X11 forwarding to your desktop over SSH, or actually browsing on the DO VM's desktop using VNC? I've done all three in the past as experiments in private browsing, and the latter is too laggy to be comfortable.
> Google is really tor/proxy/anonymous user unfriendly. Requiring users to solve as many as four or five CAPTCHAs (seriously fuck you google).
They're like this for a reason. They didn't implement complex detection of proxies to annoy users. Just to keep everyone out who's not supposed to use their search.
Yeah, people like to try and crawl Google. So they're keeping robots out.
But it's actually really nice to be able to pull a result or two from ddg by crawling, or to be able to use a VPN without having to solve a zillion captcha.
I run into those captcha's occasionally and generally reconnecting to a different VPN makes them go away. I always assume they are tied to bot activity coming through the same IP or range. I've scraped google in the past (years and years ago) and from what I recall you end up hitting the captchas after a set number of results in too short a period. Back then it was a pretty standard SEO activity, but it's usefulness was minimized when google started localizing results.
And since I regularly browse via a Digital Ocean VM, the lack of CAPTCHAs on DuckDuckGo is refreshing as well.