I thought they used Bing?
Autocomplete can be fairly easy to move in-house, so they could use their own, for languages used a lot.
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In my case I use Brave and I do exactly what you say, only if I want to go to DDG, I use the !d bang.
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I use StartPage. I know they are affiliated with an advertising firm but honestly if they are not selling out their users or being shady I don’t mind. They seem to be committed to privacy so as long as they’re transparent I’m ok with them.
I do like the fact that search queries are passed via POST (someone mentioned DDG has this option but not by default) and they do not embed your search title in the window title. The anonymous view proxy is a nice bonus but honestly it’s a moot point if you’re browsing via Tor or VPN.
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One concern of mine is that they prompt you to disable your adblocker, saying their ads are private, while having 6 trackers on their website (Duck has 3).
Interesting. What adblocker are you using? I use Control D from Windscribe for adblocking DNS and also uBlock FF extension - never had issues on Startpage.
Likewise, I use Startpage as a search engine with UBO and Proton VPN’s ad blocker and tracker and have no problems.
Startpage has always been using some baits to show adblock-warning, not as aggressive as other websites though.
It does not happen to everyone or everytime, so some might see it and some might not.
These are their current ones (at least on myside)
if (e) {
const e = document.createElement("div");
e.className = "ad widget", e.style.height = "0", e.style.width = "0", document.head.appendChild(e);
const i = () => !document.querySelector(".ad.widget") || "none" === getComputedStyle(e).display,
a = () => "serp" === t ? i() && !(() => {
const e = document.querySelector("#gcsa-top");
if (!e) return !1;
const t = Array.prototype.slice.call(e.querySelectorAll("iframe"));
if (!t.length) return !1;
for (const i of t) {
try {
if (0 === i.clientHeight) continue;
const e = new RegExp(window.location.origin, "ig");
if (i.src && !i.src.match(e)) return !0;
const t = i.contentDocument || i.contentWindow.document;
if (!t) continue;
const r = t.querySelector("#adBlock");
if (r && r.children.length <= 1) continue
} catch (r) {
return !1
}
return !0
}
return !1
})() : i();
a() && n(a());
for (let t = 0; t < 5; t++) r.push(setTimeout((() => {
n(a())
}), 1e3 * t));
o(!0)
}
The bait element is .ad.widget. The script is in
https://www.startpage.com/sp/cdn/bundles/0.4.11/51c3d067a/lib/AppHome.js
I use startpage, mainly because it gets me the best results and I find their UI better than others’.
2 Likes
I still use start page on work browsers because DDG results on non-English content or specific domain related searches are worse than start page.
For my personal browsing, I also don’t like to be asked captchas frequently when I am using VPN.
Startage removed VPN restrictions (AFAIK) and even opened an .onion (hidden website)
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Looks like they indeed are not strict to VPN any more. I’m using it with Mullvad fine this time. Last time I used it, it’s nearly unusable for me with those captcha/blocking.
Also their proxy can be a way to watch youtube for anyone who has problem with some Invidious/Piped instances.
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Did you use it a lot ? Like spam requests ?
Nope, I just browsed internet as normal.
It’s fine shortly after that and I don’t see that warning since then, so not sure if it would happen again or not.