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I noticed Google doesn’t accept search requests from tor anymore. Any way around it? Do old versions of tor still work?

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It's not Tor version problem - it's not just Google's brain problem, sadly... Under the banner of "fighting spam and hacking activities" it's actually a :

  • User tracking enforcement in form of intrusion(you can't use it without it's tracking scripts either)
  • An attempt to conform to all the censorship regulations possible
  • A direct sign of technical skill degradation of the maintenance team

Yes, it's correct to reject Tor exit point's request on the clearnet sites when you have corresponding dot-onion addresses for all of them

So - no Tor version changes will help it. Maybe an exit node was (ab)used for some bad activities, maybe they're just blocking it for being an exit node.

To change this order of things people have to rise up as many nodes with exit capabilities as possible, so the blocklist will be too big to be applied even using hardware firewalls(like ~100k addresses)

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  • Off topic: how is 100k even remotely a large rule list for a firewall? Pretty sure there's blocking lists for Pihole that have triple that...
    – skarz
    Commented Jan 15 at 16:48
  • it's not a big one to be physically loaded, of course! but 100r distinct addresses are big enough to slow things down, and they do care about speed. it will impact them
    – Alexey Vesnin ♦
    Commented Jan 15 at 19:03
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It's important to understand that the issue you're encountering with Google is not related to the version of Tor you are using. The core problem here is IP blocking, a practice commonly employed by many online services, including Google. This is a straightforward security measure where Google can block an entire range or subnet of IP addresses, often associated with Tor exit nodes, with just a short piece of code. This type of blocking is typically aimed at preventing abuse and maintaining service integrity.

Given this situation, the simplest solution when using Tor and needing to perform a web search is to switch to a Tor-friendly search engine such as DuckDuckGo, Brave, or StartPage. StartPage, in particular, is interesting because it essentially acts as a proxy for Google, providing Google search results but without directly exposing your Tor connection to Google.

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