Is startpage relatable and good search engine for privacy in 2024?
If you’re, do you using a feature ‘Anonymous view’?
It seems like literally leave no trace.
Its recommended on PG, so I would say that its probably good for privacy. Why don’t you just try it out to see if you like it
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I use Startpage, the best search engine ahead of DDG and Brave Search.
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Startpage is one of my two backup search engines (the other being Brave Search) which I use when I don’t find what I need with Duckduckgo. In the past I used it when I wanted Google results without Google, now they are a mixture Bing and Google results and possibly others.
From Duckduckgo search I fall back to Startpage with the !sp or !spi bang, and Brave with the !brave bang. In that way I can pretty seamlessly use whatever search engine I like without having to choose or change defaults.
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Brave Search does make better results compared to DDG and StartPage. Plus StartPage doesn’t allow VPN and Tor usage so I don’t use it.
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I just tested both (Startpage with VPN & Tor), and both worked fine, nothing stopped me from using Startpage with either, and even while using Tor I didn’t encounter a captcha.
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I already using it, it seems like better than duckduckgo IMO 
I recently noticed they have a partnership or something with Internxt as there is an affiliate link under the search box now:
At least from cursory look into Internxt they seem rather sketchy.
One caveat no one has mentioned yet is they only have servers in the US & the EU, this means the search speeds are very slow outside those regions.
Every time I try Startpage the search results are really good if not better than DuckDuckGo which is expected I guess because I think it uses Google’s?
I’m sticking with DuckDuckGo because of the speed for now but watching Startpage 
hopefully they can add more regions.
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One thing we forgot is censorship. I recently ran a test, I queried Tiananmen into search engines. This is to measure implicit censorship, since no search engine will explicitely censor it (except Bing)
You can see the screenshots here
Tldr is Google is neutral, with half about the massacre, and half about the place.
Brave is almost only about massacre.
Bing and bing based engines are heavily censored, except DuckDuckGo.
Feel free to do this with other sensitive subjects, anhwhere in the world.
Note : Location for search is Australia.
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I don’t agree with this, this is anecdotal evidence. I tried the exact same thing and the top result across all search engines was this Wikipedia article:
This is why anecdotal evidence isn’t really something you can rely on.
There is no reason why any of these search engines would censor this in fact it’s probably in their best interests not to do so.
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I’ve gotten so many captcha challenges on Startpage that I just can’t be bothered trying it anymore.
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Startpage is fine, I personally use https://searx.be/ I find it has the best results out of all the ones I’ve tried.
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It looks like SearX.be is configured to use Google Search for its general and image search results. (upstream sources for Searx instances can be configured by either the administrator or the end user via settings)
Of course they will not censor it if you put Tiananmen Massacre, that will be too obvious. But did you see the link I sent you ? Microsoft litterally removed all tank man results “due to an human error”.
Friendly reminder that Microsoft is present in China, with a censored bing as well (cn.bing.com).
I know this isn’t comprehensive, so feel free to run other tests to make it more comprehensive.
I typed the exact same thing you did “Tiananmen”
Even on cn.bing.com it still shows images of what you said are censored?
I don’t know if it’s censored within China, it probably is! But to say that Bing is censored outside of China just isn’t true in my opinion.
This is why this sort of anecdotal evidence is not really useful and comes across as spreading FUD.
I quickly ran some tests. For text, Brave pops up directly the protests, while Bing has an infosheet about the place.
(One of screenshot is chinese bing, which you will need a shenzhen VPS to acess)
Maybe censorship isn’t the right world. Maybe it is more bias and underrepresentation. Brave is akin to WSJ (anti-CCP), Google will be Reuters (neutral) and Bing will be South China Morning Post (lightly pro CCP).
But we have to remind ourselves the power we give to corporations to essentially shape our world view. I prefer using Brave than Microsoft or Google.
I have found a study analysing this, will tldr when I finish reading Bada Bing, Bada Boom: Microsoft Bing’s Chinese Political Censorship of Autosuggestions in North America - The Citizen Lab
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Ah thank you, I read the paper. It seems I was wrong here, Bing is indeed doing some manipulation of certain topics outside of China. I wasn’t really aware that Bing was available in China till today, definitely enlightening.
Does this mean that DuckDuckGo has some topics affected too since they use some of Bing’s index?
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Yes. I have both Google and DDG enabled for general results
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I used to use it as default search engine until it started to bother me with the capchas and vpn filters so I changed it.
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Do DuckDuckGo use their own autocomplete index ?
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