
Startpage – private search engine - bryanrasmussen
https://www.startpage.com/
======
spaceboy
A few other alternative search engines:

Searx : [https://searx.me](https://searx.me)

Searx Instances : [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-
instances](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances)

Ecosia : [https://www.ecosia.org](https://www.ecosia.org)

DeuSu : [https://deusu.org](https://deusu.org)

Also staying on topic, anyone remember Cuil?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil)

~~~
knight17
None of them have any features in addition to what we get from
Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex.

Searx seems to have categories such as music, science, news, social media and
so on which is better than nothing.

What I currently do is: (site:blogspot.com OR site:livejournal.com OR
site:wordpress.com) <query>

Blog search gives me pages written by people: fans, amatuers and sometimes
professionals; I miss such pages and perspectives when I do a general web
search in Google. Above search, however, excludes self-hosted blogs and other
hosting services. For forum search I just add something like
phpBB|vBulletin|Invision to the query which is a hit or miss. I also have
Google CSE created from my 500+ RSS feeds which gives very good results.

Earlier Google used to have both these features and it is annoying to see they
remove useful functions. I just hope someone comes up with a search engine for
blogs and discussion forums.

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nitrogen
I've seen startpage forced as the default search engine and home page on
relatives computers by some installer they'd run. My inclination is not to
trust organizations that use such tactics.

~~~
StartPageSearch
Hi nitrogen. They may have also experienced the reported DuckDuckGo Browser
Hijacker see: [https://duck.co/forum/thread/24346/what-is-the-duckduckgo-
br...](https://duck.co/forum/thread/24346/what-is-the-duckduckgo-browser-
hijacker). _Both are viruses that have nothing to do with the legitimate
search engines._

Hope this helps!

~~~
jameskegel
I wonder why someone feel incentivised to do this. Can you offer any insight
as to why someone unrelated to your org would design malware that switched the
default search to your site?

~~~
StartPageSearch
There are good hackers that will likely save our world from disaster.

Then there are bad hackers out there with various motives, often monetary.
Some of them make a living or get a thrill by propagating viruses.

You will notice there are companies selling software to remove viruses, like
the supposed DuckDuckGo virus, for example: [http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-
duckduckgo.html](http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-duckduckgo.html)

There are virus creators out there that take the names of legitimate companies
like DuckDuckGo and StartPage, likely to trick people for their own reasons.

Let me emphasize again that _DuckDuckGo and StartPage are legitimate search
engines, and the reported viruses that try to benefit from respected industry
names like these have nothing to do with the legitimate search services._

~~~
sametmax
I never seen any malware installing ddg as the default page, but I've seen
many installing startpage. Also commercial softwares with default checkbox. I
cleaned one just some days ago on my girl's laptop.

Sorry, I have no way to know if you are a victim or a bad actor in the matter,
but I choose to ban you from anything I touch. And I know every geeks around
me do the same.

If you are indeed a victim, I'm sorry for you and hope you'll find a way to
get your legitimacy back. Right now it's very bad.

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eptcyka
I'm wary of these things, there is no way I can trust they do what they say
they do without having direct access to their infrastructure anyway. And if
they are getting results from Google, surely they are at the mercy google when
it comes to survival.

~~~
greglindahl
All of the things that look like search engines get their results from Google,
Bing, or (occasionally) Yandex. Building your own big search index is not
something you can raise $1 million and just go do.

~~~
deusu
You can do your own search-index with 2.3 billion pages for about €300/month:

[https://deusu.org](https://deusu.org)

~~~
greglindahl
I think your project is great for how it does so much with so few resources,
but most big search engines have an index which is more than 1,000X as large
as yours (per document), in order to improve results.

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kriro
I'm using Startpage on my desktop at home. I like the general idea but have
noticed that it is very slow at times (enough so that I have an alternative
search engine I use when I get "annoyed"). Overall it's pretty good though.
Basically a privacy wrapper around Google (which of course is also likely the
explanation for the slowness and a big danger as they could be hosed by Google
pretty quickly).

~~~
StartPageSearch
Hi Kriro. For image search, DuckDuckGo may be a hair faster because it uses
Amazon AWS servers. But other searches should be about the same speed.

Please contact us if you see this happening so we can address it.

A recent article did a speed comparison test of StartPage vs. DuckDuckGo,
along with other comparisons. See:
[http://securityspread.com/2016/10/24/duckduckgo-
startpage-20...](http://securityspread.com/2016/10/24/duckduckgo-
startpage-2016-update/)

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Tankenstein
If they're hitting google apis, they must be paying obscene amounts of money,
right?

~~~
OV-104
Also seems kind of redundant, why not just go through Google?

~~~
morganvachon
[https://www.startpage.com/eng/protect-
privacy.html#hmb](https://www.startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html#hmb)

I've been using them for years, and switched to them full time when I gave up
all things Google a few months ago. The results are better than DDG, though
DDG in my opinion has a much better site design (especially under the hood;
it's very clean).

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xorfish
I had startpage as my default search engine for some time.

It is pretty slow compared to google and duckduckgo, so I switched to
duckduckgo.

~~~
StartPageSearch
Thank you for using private search, no matter which private search engine you
use!

DuckDuckGo uses Amazon web servers so they may be just a hair bit faster for
image search according to a recent comparison article. See:
[http://securityspread.com/2016/10/24/duckduckgo-
startpage-20...](http://securityspread.com/2016/10/24/duckduckgo-
startpage-2016-update/)

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veenified
So is the concept that they are providing Google-like results with the privacy
of Duck Duck Go? I have never had any issue with using Duck Duck Go.

~~~
yellowapple
Sometimes DDG doesn't give the most relevant results; to work around this, if
I haven't found something by using DDG, I'll stick a !s in front of the query
to check StartPage instead.

~~~
nsuser3
> !s in front

Any position works

~~~
bilkow
s! works too

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hypercluster
I haven been using Startpage for quite a while now ad my default search
engine. Google results + privacy, great! On iOS you can set DDG as the default
search engine, make a shortcut maybe for "!sp" and search on SP! The site
could be a little quicker and some results nowadays only seem to appear only
on Google but it's still great.

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rxlim
I use StartPage and thinks it works very well.

I like the "Proxy" function, but it's only available for search results, it
would be nice if you could submit a link and use the proxy function for pages
not indexed by StartPage, they could then send their crawler to that domain
and the search engine would improve.

~~~
StartPageSearch
Thank you for using StartPage.com for search privacy! I will pass along your
suggestion to our tech team. :-)

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spaceboy
Does anyone know if there is a considerable difference between
[https://startpage.com/](https://startpage.com/) and
[https://eu.startpage.com/](https://eu.startpage.com/) ?

~~~
StartPageSearch
Hi. Do you mean Ixquick.eu? Ixquick.eu is sister to StartPage that delivers
metasearch results, but without Google or Yahoo search results. (It used to
deliver Yahoo results, too.)

We ended our contract with Yahoo for Ixquick.eu because they were reported to
be working with the US government to access user information See:
[http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/technology/startpage-to-
dr...](http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/technology/startpage-to-drop-yahoo-
from-search-results-35138188.html)

~~~
spaceboy
Thanks for explaining this!

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Havoc
Seems like a good thing. I just hope their business model is sustainable.

~~~
lucideer
Sponsored results, according to
[https://www.startpage.com/eng/company.html](https://www.startpage.com/eng/company.html)

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corobo
Oh wow this is legit? I always figured it was one of those referral spam
things in my analytics.

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scandox
A related company: [https://www.startmail.com/](https://www.startmail.com/)

There is more info on that site about the Team and Company.

