Startpage was bought by an advertising company. I suggest to not bother with that search engine anymore.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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Damn! Why do the good die young? Thanks for sharing, I'll give it a miss.
It's fine, start page still has control over their search engine, system 1 just takes some profit. The privacy policy is also distinctly different to the ad tech company
I used it for a bit. For a supposedly privacy focused search engine, they sure dislike when users connect through a VPN. I'm met with constant identity checks and, with certain queries, straight up access denied pages. Selling the company to an ad agency is another massive red flag. It's unfortunate since we're starved for decent, free search options these days, but skip them.
i encounter the same problems there, and at ecosia, whenever i don't connect directly and with some of my addons disabled.
I don't encounter this issue with AirVPN anymore, but I used to.
The good thing about Startpage is that they give you proxy links for every searchresult. Therefore if the website/cloudflare blocks VPN traffic you can still access the website sometimes :)
It's now a better search engine in that VPN users don't get thrown off after two searches anymore. But the fact that it's owned by a data harvesting company means it's a risk to use.
Lots of people mentioning Kagi. Sorry, but any engine that needs an account to work is not for me. They say you can pay anonymously, but none of their payment methods are anonymous. And $10 per month for unlimited searches?
Kagi is awesome. I strongly recommend giving them a try.
I used it for quite a while
I switched to kagi recently and never been happier
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There's proof they allowed Microsoft to use trackers though...I dig DDG as they were one of the first functional alternative search engines to Google with an emphasis on privacy, yet there are much better options today. I'm going to have to peep kagi based on this thread, but I'll need to be strongly convinced to switch from SearXNG.
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Being an accident would be news to me. Since it sources Bing for results, you'd think Microsofts trackers would be a focal point of their privacy approach. Sleeping on trackers known to be present isn't a good look either way.
Never heard of it, but something to check out for sure. I’ve been using Kagi and it reminds me just how far gone most search engines have become.
I’d consider paying but…. not that much 🤷🏻♂️
Fair enough, but it’s usually either pay or let yourself become the product. For what it’s worth, instead of having to append “Reddit” or other items to get proper results, Kagi actually lists useful results. And for the number of queries that I’ve run this month, it’s less than 1cent a search. Not having to shift through all the shit results is worth 1cent to me.
I scatter my data across ALL the search engines. Run multiple browsers (four different Firefox instances alone, including mobile), and use a different search engine in each. Also uBlockOrigin. The online data they all have on me is…incomplete.
I used it at one point, but I found it slower than DDG or SearXNG
I use it for some time now and all my browsers. I am surprised it does not have more users. In my opinion it's easier to find what you want with startpage than duckduckgo
Because Start page uses Google results, DDG uses Bing.
Most search engines that claim to be private (StartPage, Qwant, etc) are fake and will try their hardest to sneakily profit from user data, with DuckDuckGo being the greatest example as they were caught selling user data to Microsoft, only stopping so when they were caught. The only search engine I would recommend is SearXNG. It's feature rich and is primarily ran by privacy enthusiasts.
The link you provide says otherwise though? Serving Microsoft ads now equals to selling user data? I'm pretty confused 🤔
Might want to consider hosting your own Whoogle instance instead?
I'm really put off by the fact a privacy centered search engine would require captcha for VPN users. It was annoying to use on MullvadVPN.