Your guess is wrong. This isn't a custom version of google. It's just a regular akamai reverse proxy setup.
> Either it is for agents in the field to inconspicuously use google
By visiting a nsa.gov subdomain served by akamai? Yeah right. I feel like heading to www.google.com would be far less conspicuous.
Re:Captcha.nsa.gov
by captainmuon on Monday February 03, 2020 @01:02PM
(#22226945)
You can do that? I would expect Google to flag connections to the search page that don't terminate on a residential/commercial IP as suspicious and show you the near "unsolvable" captcha.
At least that is my experience with proxying google services (e.g. silly setup for accessing them from China). Datacenter IPs or SSL "MitM" connections reliably trigger it.
Anecdotal, and I'm guessing it's because I was logged in (to my long standing personal Google account) - but I didn't have any issues when I was VPN'd through a Vultr vps of mine when I was in my dorm.
Again I'm guessing it's because I was logged in, from google chrome.
Depends very much on which datacenter you're using. I'd imagine google doesn't get much (any) bot traffic from Akamai, so I'm not surprised that their ranges aren't flagged yet.
But all it takes is a few dozen queries in fast succession and google will start showing a captcha. At least, that is how it seemed to be a few years ago.
Akamai rotates their source IPs a lot so you wouldn’t get a captcha very fast.
I wonder how many people are currently submitting queries via that page...
Re:Captcha.nsa.gov
by VectorLock on Monday February 03, 2020 @01:27PM
(#22227262)
I'd love to know what the distribution of tries on the "unsolvable" captcha is when served to real people operating in good faith.
Maybe this is just a fake front page that calls to the Google search API and pretends to be Google proper. Either it is for agents in the field to inconspicuously use google or they misconfigured it to be public?