Brave is supported by Linux. I'm running it on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
EDIT: I went to their site hoping to find a link for download and strangely they say there is no direct support. I'm running it and it works great. I wish I could remember how the hell I got it on there (I've been running it for a year probably on this particular machine.)
Okay. I'm up and running Brave. In the system tray I see two dots, which in Firefox I've got two iterations of Firefox running. In Brave it appears on is Brave the second is Brave running a private TOR window. Is this typical?
Brave gives you the option of browsing with TOR or not. It asks you very openly if/when you want to use it. Default is normal non-tor browsing.
Use Brave on YouTube, and do not sign in.
Blocks the ads and videos
I have to admit that I am hooked on Chrome mostly because it may take me some time to import all of the bookmarks and arrange settings in a new browser. .
a simple search will reveal some less known browser that have enhanced privacy and even built in vpn. I haven't tried them yet but I am seriously debating between TOR and UR browsers. I have to admit that I am hooked on Chrome mostly because it may take me some time to import all of the bookmarks and arrange settings in a new browser. But even if you have chrome, VPN services like CyberGhost offer a free browser extension VPN that gets turned on and off with a simple click and it works. I have verified that my IP is not what others see when I use the VPN service.
Features
No ads or sponsored content
No javascript
No cookies
No tracking/linking of your personal IP address*
No AMP links
No URL tracking tags (i.e. utm=%s)
No referrer header
Tor and HTTP/SOCKS proxy support
Autocomplete/search suggestions
POST request search and suggestion queries (when possible)
View images at full res without site redirect (currently mobile only)
Dark mode
Randomly generated User Agent
Easy to install/deploy
DDG-style bang (i.e. !<tag> <query> searches
Optional location-based searching (i.e. results near <city>
Optional NoJS mode to disable all Javascript in results
A whois lookup of that IP address shows that it belongs to a block of IPs registered to Web2Objects. Searching for that ISP reveals that several sites identify them as "high risk" for fraud. Google's infrastructure assuredly maintains reference lists of IP ranges belonging to VPN services and deliberately captchas or outright blocks that traffic both for legitimate reasons and butthurt reasons (want to hide your "true" IP? No fair!)
Can you cycle through other datacenters and try to hit the site from other countries/IP ranges?
I see your local IP in the URL field of the browser but what is the 45.56.183.151 IP address shown in the output right above the timestamp closer to the bottom?
I don't know anything about Whoogle but I'm assuming it's still somehow reaching out to the Internet at large to make the queries. I assumed that IP was the one assigned to you by the VPN provider. I need to do some research about what Whoogle does since I'm making a lot of assumptions.
EDIT: Thanks for the explanation about how Whoogle works. I think that other IP is the public IP your VPN service is assigning and since its a commercial VPN it might just be on a "bad" list.
EDIT EDIT: I found a Whoogle install guide for Docker and they list no IP tracking as a feature. I don't know if that means they proxy your traffic so Google doesn't see your public IP at all, or that they just don't maintain any tracking of the IP from one page to another. Still, that output at the bottom of your screenshot sure seems like Google is unhappy with the 45.x.x.x address, whatever it is.
That IP is 45.56.183.151 is the one that ExpressVPN has assigned. I’m going to experiment a bit more tonight and select other VPN locations to see if there is one, not blocked by Google. I’ll report back.
When originating from your home IP source IP traffic is limited and Google algorithms not picking up...You go through VPN and 5000 other people doing the same thing....That will trip some algorithms...
If you stood up your on server on some cloud provider to act as a VPN it probably would not trip.
This is a nice tool that you can use to see if the IP address your VPN has assigned is readily identifiable as a VPN/Proxy IP.
https://ip.teoh.io/vpn-detection