Brave search broken, setting back to google.com

None of the brave search functions are working anymore. Even from the help menu.
Searching from the address bar is dead.
Everything I try to do comes up with a captcha challenge.
This is NOT acceptable. These captcha popups are out of control.
I switched back to google as the search engine, and everything works again.
I will try duckduckgo, and others too, but brave is now dead to me. Constant captchas are already bad enough, I’m not going to put up with them in my browser searches.

update: duckduckgo works too, as expected. Only brave is broken.