Why? Maybe he/she wants to bypass data collection in his/her country. Or desires more privacy, or something else.

How?

ssh -D 8080 digital-ocean-vm-here.tld

Now port 8080 on your local machine is a socks proxy for your vm.

Google is really tor/proxy/anonymous user unfriendly. Requiring users to solve as many as four or five CAPTCHAs (seriously fuck you google).

> 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.

Which is funny, because those people can easily circumvent these measures, and crawl Google anyway.

The only one hurt are the users.

> And what do the CAPTCHAs have to do with it?

Have you ever tried using Google's search over a VPN / Tor / public proxy? They're even worse than Cloudflare was with their CAPTCHAs).

> Why?

Probably to avoid fuckery by the local ISP and/or government.

> And how?

I'm assuming he meant OpenVPN or something, but I might be wrong.