It should be removed, yes, but your second sentence is inaccurate; they don’t anymore.
I haven’t seen anyone mention this, but Startpage is proprietary, so we are relying on them to keep their word. Moreover, they don’t seem to be making good decisions even with System1’s supposed funding.
Even then, however, we have to take their word for it.
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So are all search engines Privacy Guides recommends, except for SearXNG, so I wouldn’t see this as that important.
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Thanks for addressing that, and now thinking about it, they all have issues.
That doesn’t =/= “hostile” to Tor or VPNs
Captchas are indeed a minor inconvenience for VPN/Tor users in general, but lets not blow things out of proportion.
Services, including privacy centric services, have a legitimate interest in and need for preventing abuse of their services. Outright blocking Tor or VPNs or making it effectively difficult to use a service with a VPN or Tor could be considered hostility, but occasional captchas is a pretty fair middleground between priorities (privacy, security, and anti-abuse) if its a policy that is implemented in good faith.
I use a fulltime VPN, I probably only use Startpage 2-3 times a week, but its rare that I encounter a captcha–rare enough that I honestly can’t remember if I’ve ever encountered a captcha on startpage.
Occasional captchas is just the cost of using a VPN or Tor since these tools are (mostly used by normal people, doing normal things, but also:) are often used by bad actors/people doing malicious things.
I mean it need to be very infrequent IMO. Captchas are fine, unfortunately Google has completely ruined them with horrible design.
No further response from Startpage other than their claim that they were investigating this, which they made 4 days ago; srsltid tracker still exists. I’ll give them maybe a few more days, but this isn’t a good look.
There’s still no further response from Startpage. It’s been a full week since they claimed they were investigating the issue, despite it only taking two days for them to initially reply.
I don’t think they’re actually investigating, I think they just gave me the standard support message then ghosted me. The srsltid tracker still exists, and no further communication has happened.
I think I’m going to need assistance from the PrivacyGuides team. I’ll try mentioning the ones that were involved last time something happened with Startpage: @jonah and @Niek-de-Wilde
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Any update on the topic?
I have this thread on my mind, but am currently a bit swamped with work so I have unfortunatly not had the time to pick this up yet.
How’s everyone’s experience with the image results from brave search? While I’ve been using it for search terms, I always found their image results terrible.
That’s where I usually defer to startpage since they’re using Google algo. Had we removed startpage, I’d be curious to know what the alternative would be for a robust and non privacy invasive image search.
There’s really not many updates.
I might try contacting Startpage again, but I doubt that’s going to work; they ghosted me last time.
I think our best bet is to wait for Niek.