Heard some sketchy stuff about duckduckgo recently, found out about start page.many users?
Startpage was bought by an advertising company. I suggest to not bother with that search engine anymore.
Damn! Why do the good die young? Thanks for sharing, I’ll give it a miss.
It wasn’t young, it’s been around a long time
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
Nothing new, but it’s still a privacy centred search engine, but, same as Google search, whose engine does it use, puts advertisings, related to the search at the beginning of the results. It’s annoying but not put in risk your privacy. You can check it by yourself, with Webkoll, UrlVoid, Blacklight, etc. There are no cookies, trackers, logs or other profiling crap in Startpage. Anyway there are a lot of other search engines out there which you can use, Whoogle, Andisearch, AstianGo (default search engine from the Midori browser, a FF fork, but better, FOSS), Mojeek, Qwant, MetaGer, DDG, if you have little children, the 100% family save Swisscows, if you want planting trees or support social projects, use Ecosia or Good search. All of these protect your privacy and don’t log your searches, nor track you. Sponsor ads, or context based, like Startpage has, instead on surveilling or profiling, to create incommings, are not a privacy or security issue, server costs money. If you want to avoid it, you must use a selfhosted solucion or trust a public instance (Whoogle, SearX) or use a search engine which recieve a commision when you buy something online (Andisearch) or similar methodes that do not compromise your data.
To avoid are Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, which make money with surveillance advertising, logging your search and profiling you to sell your data to advertising companies, this is a risk and lack of privacy, not the other
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 :)
I’d recommend SearXNG instead.
It now has engines for searching lemmy too
Aw, the instance I use doesn’t seem to have it (yet?)
It’s at least available if you’re self-hosting.
Just had a brief look, will look into it more later, but that looks really cool!
Do you have to host it yourself?
Nope. Nor should you, if you’d only use it yourself, since pooling is integral if you don’t want to be profiled.
There are public instances at Searx.space.
I take the opposite view - you definitely should host it yourself. Any public instance you don’t directly control can insert any sort of code they want to.
A cheap VPS, rented using Monero, with SearXNG on it ensures privacy.
If you do that, make it public, or else you can get profiled again.
Whoever wants to can profile as much as they like. My VPN’s always on and I rent the VPS using Monero.
If you’re not using a vpn on your vps, it’s the same as using google directly. And if you’re only using the vpn on your desktop it’s even worse, since google will just tie you to your VPS ip.
More than happy for google to tie my searches to the VPS’ IP.
That is the point, If you want to go really private, there is no other to self host on a own server. If not, it’s better to use any of the other “normal” search engine with a good reputation. the privacy it has you can check with the services above mencioned., and to repeat until boredom: important to read TOS and PP to avoid surprises. These are legally binding documents, that is, if they do strange things with your data, without specifying it in this texts, a ton of bricks can fall on them with million-dollar complaints.
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.
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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.
You are thinking of a browser app, not the search engine. And by “allowing”, you mean “did not add to the blacklist of things to block when using their browser”. And they rectified this pretty quickly, so there’s a not insubstantial chance it was just an accident.
Blacklists are going to be imperfect by definition, if uBlock Origin misses a tracker I’m not going to say it’s “allowing” the site to track me
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.
Even if that’s true: It still is prone to enshittification.
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I used it for quite a while
I switched to kagi recently and never been happier
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 🤷🏻♂️
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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 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.
Nowhere in that article does it say they were selling data to Microsoft…
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.
Go to MetaGer
