StartPage

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 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.

ixquick.de, or allso known as startpage.com offers this service as a private organisation. They say that they don't save your IP-Adress and don't use tracking-cookies. They suggest your surfing is sure.
Fact is:
- There are no trackingtools recognized of any tracking blocker
- They search with google, forwarding your question.
For everithing else we only have their word not to do things with your data you don't want to. There is no transparence how they finance this page, and no transparence what pupose they have to offer this service for free.
This could be a page of any secret service or private sniffing organisation as well as someone who offers it for a good ethik pupose. Nobody knows and every one can judge to themself what is more likely.

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

Since using startpage everytime I search for anything on google I get email adverts following up on my recent searches. Last month for examples I've tried to look for holiday destinations and suddenly my yahoo emails are flooded with adverts from travel websites promoting the destinations I had searched for and tripadvisor asking me if I still want to go there. Mind you when I did my search I never logged into any website including tripadvisor, I only did the search on StartPage. It's awful!

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.

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.

I started using startpage a few weeks ago becuase I am sick to death of the never ending "Read google privacy policiy, which means either you let them know everything about you or dont use google.
I am just an average guy who searches the net for things that interest me, history, photography, news, and delving into things I dont know much about.
I have found Startpage pretty good, it may be a bit slower but then you are asking Startpage to ask google so thats not a surprise, anyway it is only a matter of seconds if that. The results are to me very satisfying.
One thing I missed was google maps so I have to go to google if I want them but other than that I cannot fault Startpage. I am not a nerd just someone who users a seach engine reasonably regularly. I run it with Firefox and both give me pleasing results. It is nice not to forever having google want me to agree to yet another privacy update before I can continue what I am doing.
I think more and more people need to start reviewing their on line presence, the old saying if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear is way out of date.

The problem with StartPage (formerly Ixquick) is that their search results are nothing compared to what you would get with Google. You can test it for yourself. The search results are surprisingly horrible, and in some cases unusable, e.g., getting zero results on a set of search terms with StartPage while Google provides hundreds of matches... still happening a year later after my Ixquick review. Privacy is essential, but a search engine must have some useful capacity comparatively speaking, and StartPage just doesn't cut it.

Update (5/20/17): In response to the reply from StartPage S. -- I'm on a dynamic IP (it changes regularly), never logged in to Google, have no Google software installed on my computer, and my browser cache is always cleared, etc. So Google has no search history or profile or any other means to track me or my searches.

Besides, I don't use Google and haven't for several years now. I've only used Google to comparatively test results among other search engines. I've done a number of tests over the past several years, all of which were conducted under new/different IP addresses, and some of which were at different geographical locations. Bottom line, the "tracking variable" in my tests is effectively controlled.

And as I've already mentioned, the issue here is in the quality of search results as well as the quantity, e.g., zero results with StartPage while Google provides hundreds in some cases. Moreover, I'm also comparing StartPage results with other non-tracking search engines. Sorry, but the technical glitch is not on my end.

For those interested, I've opted to use DuckDuckGo. It has its problems as well, but comparatively it remains the best out of the non-tracking alternatives out there, all of which still fall behind Google in terms of their search results, but from my testing and experience the best alternative to Google for privacy.