Ever since your IP address or subnet did a tad too many searches without logging in and consenting to google's tracking. Happens routinely on any VPN IP, the threshold isn't high.
It is also very finicky though. Unbearable on Ungoogled-Chromium when you search directly through the address bar, though a lot better after you actually navigate to the site. And very rarely a problem in Brave. Both cases on a private VPN on a VPS and pretty aggressive DNS level blocking. Google did make searching on Ungoogled-Chrome a nightmare though, so I suspect something is being done right.
Your own private VPS isn't too bad. I use that with a firefox with privacy settings turned up to eleven and don't have problems with google (yandex on the other hand always serves me captchas)
But on any anonymous VPN shared with other people google captcha bans IPs pretty quickly
DDG is my default search and is great for when you want something that is on English wikipedia. For other stuff it is not there yet, especially programming or when it misinterprets Portuguese as Spanish.
