This would explain why Google has been blocking TOR searches with endless capchas. I thought it was just profitz.
I've stopped using Google as a search engine on the consumer side. My default now has been duckduckgo for awhile, maybe the past 5 years or so. Try it. Set all your browsers on all your devices to use the duck and just delete or remove google. You won't miss it.
I agree, I did the same some months ago and I also use a combined squid+privoxy+tor installation to route a whole bunch of domains strictly over tor for our whole network.
For the user the experience is at first a bit confusing, mostly because duckduckgo doesn't personalize results. So often users feel at first that the result quality is worse than google. People got used to the fact that google knows pretty much what they are searching for before they enter the first character into the searchbox, so they either lost or never developed skills to properly search in a text index. I.e. they enter "I want to make an applepie" instead of "recipe apple pie".
Oh and yes, if LEO has a warrant for you, google will happily send them your search history of up to 20yrs back! They can identify you over dozens of devices because they are basically sitting in almost every single web page with google-analytics, google-fonts and whatnot. Ever wondered why you are not allowed to download these friggin fonts for example?
I am currently reading (or trying to, it is written in a quite sophisticated and academic-sounding english)
Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power' - it gives you a good idea on what google's business model is and how it works. She argues for example that if you are not a customer, you are the product is wrong, in case of google you are just a resource to harvest to them.
Soshana also appears a few times in
The Social Dilemma which I highly recommend if you are unclear about the real purpose and goals of facebook and co.
But then again, if you have nothing to hide and are prepared to explain every single search you did in the last 20yrs, google is fine and on top of that not evil.
On the other hand if the search engine has nothing to hide is not evil, it let's you access it via tor.. (which DDG does)