StartPageReviews 39

Startpage is almost perfect! It's just as advertised—all the quality search results of Google and none of the invasive tracking. My one quibble as that, personally, I find the format for image search results rather unpleasant, and this is a central feature. However, given all its other advantages, I'm willing to trade infinite image scroll and easy viewing for privacy.

StartPage banned me from their search engine due to "unusual traffic similar to bots". They also mentioned use of a VPN & Tor privacy browser as contributing factors - and I was using both. It seems strange that they call themselves a privacy browser, and yet they disallow privacy tools that might hide personal data from THEM. If Startpage doesn't collect and sell data as they claim, how are they paying salaries & bills? Does Startpage offer proof of their altruistic claims? Do they have verification from the privacy police? After they banned me, I deleted Startpage from all my browsers and replaced it with DuckDuckGo.

Was happy using startpage and startmail and mail up until now. Came home and tried to use startpage and got a message a message saying due to a high degree of usage from my ip address they are not letting me use startpage because I may be a bot.This after I reinstalled windows and the cloud decided to upload my photos and videos. That's all I took for them to get their panties in a Knott.
Anyway if you use startpage watch you usage or they won't like it.
I think I'm done with them.

Such a great ordering experience. Design team was super quick with responses and created a product just like I had envisioned. Delivery was sooner than quoted.

When doing an extensive search, I always get blocked with this message; We apologize for the inconvenience: to prevent possible abuse of our service, your ability to connect to Startpage has been suspended at this time.

This happens when a large number of search requests are received from a particular internet connection during a short period of time. Screen scraping software may trigger this, as would a connection shared by many people at the same time, for example a VPN server or through Tor. Often, this can be resolved by connecting through a different server through your VPN provider or by connecting through a different Tor exit node.

It sucks.

I love how a search engine can help us with our privacy, reducing the chances of spreading our data and information online. Hopefully more people will start using Startpage.
Thanks!

Gives me the performance of google with the privacy of an non profit organization. Well done. Keep up the good work.

I have been a fun of Startpage since it used to be Ixquick. It helps me to get high quality search results while avoiding pervasive surveillance.

Started using this a year ago and have not looked back to Google. Highly recommend it to people who used shared or family devices.

I did a search on stimulus checks and numerous sites with baseless claims about election fraud came up. WTF?!?! I've never experienced this from ANY search engine.
If they do this, how can they be trusted?

Startpage is a trojan horse. They pretend to care about your privacy. They don't. If you use an anonymizing proxy, they block you from searching. They are big tech creeps in disguise. Use DuckDuckGo instead.

Users who use anonymizing proxies receive the following error message when trying to use Startpage, a supposedly "private" search engine:

We apologize for the inconvenience: to prevent possible abuse of the Startpage.com service, your Internet connection has been prevented from accessing it at this time.

This happens when a large number of search requests are received from one's Internet connection in a short amount of time -- for example, if you are using "screen-scraping" software, or if you are sharing a connection with many people, perhaps through a proxy service.

Otherwise, if you have received this message in error, please help us in investigation by providing following information:

- Are you using TOR or other anonymous proxies?
- Do you have special browser configuration or extensions?
- Are you using VPN?
- Are you using a company network?

We will seek to refine and correct this whenever possible. Thank you for your patience.

I agree with other reviewers that the search results yielded by Startpage are vastly inferior to other search engines. Misplaced a letter from your query? Sorry, no results found! Looking for exact phrases? Startpage is more likely to fail than other search engines, or return blatantly incorrect results, and actually relevant results either don't show up or are further down the search results, often in 3rd and 4th pages. Sometimes, I get some sort of IP blocks for no reason while browsing, and I have to reset my router for it to work again.

If you truly want as many search results as you possibly can find to get the information you are looking for, do not use StartPage. StartPage can respect your privacy by not using an algorithm to find everything about you to give you search results to feed your confirmation bias. But, StartPage has not modernized the amount of Google search results in its database system. Google has waaay more search results compared to StartPage. Which speaks volume about StartPage's quality altogether. People who want privacy will benefit from StartPage. However, people who want quality search results despite privacy violation need to use the Google search engine or the DuckDuckGo search engine. Unfortunately, I used to like StartPage until I realized how outdated and unreliably limited it was when it came to searching for things and will switch to DuckDuckGo again. Fortunately, I might think about switching back to StartPage once StartPage business people start modernizing StartPage's search results.

Very disappointed in StartPage lately. Basically, the results HAVE NOTHING to do with my query. I have been using StartPage mostly for over a year and then off/on for 3 years. The longer I use it the worse it gets in finding relevant results. So my last query was for driving directions from point A to point B, and the results were ridiculous - how to drive from Pittsburgh to a Baseball Stadium. (I'm on the west coast) Or how to drive from Point A to Point X. You get the picture.