Thanks. Didn’t know of Whoogle. Tried running it in multiple computers and browsers but always got the following error:
Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it’s really you sending the requests, and not a robot.
Any idea how I can get around it?
Thanks!
I remember checking on Whoogle recently and it seemed like it was unmaintained… Am I mistaken?
Nothing surprising when there is System1
Is there not though a certain hypocrisy in avoiding Google and it’s search engine but nevertheless using it in a masked/disguised fashion ?
Everything is hypocrisy in this world, Microsoft funds and donates to Linux and invests with Meta in open source when everything else they do is closed source, Google finances Mozilla Firefox and Apple, Signal relies on AWS and receives funding from the US government.
GOS, Divest and others rely on Android for their development, so we’re not far from hypocrisy.
I don’t necessarily see the hypocrisy (unless your reason for not using Google is you dislike Google’s search results, or you don’t want to contribute/participate in Google’s search dominance).
But if your main concern is just the privacy-invasiveness of Google, and you can find a way to still get Google search results in a way that is adequately privacy respecting for you, I don’t see anything particularly hypocritical about that (particularly considering that almost all search engines that are not Google or Bing use Google or Bing as an upstream or a supplemental source for at least some of their results (this includes both Duckduckgo and Brave Search (to a lesser extent))
Brave’s Google Fall-back option is fully opt-in. Brave Search, don’t use any third-party for results.
I am no longer being prompted to allow access to my device’s HTML5 canvas data on Mullvad or Tor browser on Startpage. It appears they have removed the request for Canvas data now.
This might be because uBlock now blocks vf.startpage.com
Tor does not have uBlock installed.
Somebody edited the fa4874d0f7f644dec8ad457f0db0a852.js script. JShelter still fires off though, and the ct fingerprint still gets sent over.
That’s a shame.
Mullvad Browser does, and Tor Browser in Tails does too.
Yes, I meant the Tor browser installation I was running the test on did not have uBlock.
Are you sure about that?
I remember that being true in the past.
But when I look in Brave Search settings, the option to enable/disable ‘Google Fallback Mixing’ is gone. Which initially made me think Brave discontinued the feature, but Brave still refers to the existence of the feature in their documentation.
It’s been 48 hours. Any further replies from Startpage?
Not sure what country Startpage is located in but this is a Holiday Weekend in the US. If they are a US company I wouldn’t expect to hear back before Tuesday.
Edit: Startpage is headquarted in NL, their parent company System1 is headquarted in the US.
Check the last column of the table 
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#recommended-providers
Not gone.
Yes, 100% independent. Read Brave Search removes last remnant of Bing from search results page, achieving 100% independence and providing real alternative to Big Tech search | Brave
It is gone (on my end):
But the fact that you (and presumably some others) see the option, would explain why the docs still refer to that option. I’m not sure why the option isn’t available to me, maybe it is based on region, language [edit: actually it looks like we are both using same language and region] or some other unknown factor.
update: It appears Brave Search gives different options to different browsers, despite the search engine being independent from choice of browser. Brave search accessed through Brave Browser shows Google Mixing as an optional setting, Brave search accessed through Firefox does not. I don’t know if this is a dark pattern, or if there is a legitimate technical reason for this.
