[packetslave]

This. The reality is, Google (and Cloudflare, and everyone else trying to block scrapers and malicious traffic) use heuristics that boil down to "99% of our traffic behaves like this". If you go out of your way to fall into the 1%, e.g. using Tor, disabling Javascript, randomizing your user-agent, etc., you're going to get CAPTCHAed.

[Laforet]

Yeah, blending in seems to work better in many cases. Remember the guy who sent a bomb threat over TOR? The only reason he was caught so quickly was because he's the only person on the organisation's network to have accessed TOR before the incident.