Tor... Google is pretty hostile in terms of "anti-robot" tests.
Yes....Google search also routinely objects to my use of a VPN.
The anti-robot testing seems very erratic too. Sometimes the challenge may be matching 3 images and the next time it could take 20 image matches before a successful "Verify".
Due to this, I also use DuckDuckGo occasionally. In general I'm not a big fan of their search results or the connection to Bing.