Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has always been showing captchas when using their search engine for quiet a long time (even for VPN users). In fact they were even straight blocking users from using that very same captcha: https://bugs.torproject.org/23840
I more meant that Google offers a captcha service for others that is quite good, them implemented a really terrible one for the internal services. It truly is awful to deal with. Whoever made it must have been smoking crack or taking large quantities of lsd
They're identical now, I rarely got the awful one that you're talking about when searching on Google.