Startpage – private search engine | Hacker News Reader

Startpage – private search engine

startpage.com

97 pointsbryanrasmussen53 comments

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A few other alternative search engines:

Searx : https://searx.me

Searx Instances : https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances

Ecosia : https://www.ecosia.org

DeuSu : https://deusu.org

Also staying on topic, anyone remember Cuil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil

None of them have any features in addition to what we get from Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex.

Searx seems to have categories such as music, science, news, social media and so on which is better than nothing.

What I currently do is: (site:blogspot.com OR site:livejournal.com OR site:wordpress.com) <query>

Blog search gives me pages written by people: fans, amatuers and sometimes professionals; I miss such pages and perspectives when I do a general web search in Google. Above search, however, excludes self-hosted blogs and other hosting services. For forum search I just add something like phpBB|vBulletin|Invision to the query which is a hit or miss. I also have Google CSE created from my 500+ RSS feeds which gives very good results.

Earlier Google used to have both these features and it is annoying to see they remove useful functions. I just hope someone comes up with a search engine for blogs and discussion forums.

Another really interesting search engine : http://yacy.net/en/index.html

CLIQZ: Very private Search Engine and Browser - https://cliqz.com/en/

+ Algorithmic anti-tracking: http://www2016.net/proceedings/proceedings/p121.pdf

I've seen startpage forced as the default search engine and home page on relatives computers by some installer they'd run. My inclination is not to trust organizations that use such tactics.

I presume you don't use Google Search then, since a huge number of Windows executable installers bundled Google Chrome, as well as Google Desktop and/or Google Toolbar (back when they were a thing).

Hi nitrogen. They may have also experienced the reported DuckDuckGo Browser Hijacker see: https://duck.co/forum/thread/24346/what-is-the-duckduckgo-br.... Both are viruses that have nothing to do with the legitimate search engines.

Hope this helps!

I wonder why someone feel incentivised to do this. Can you offer any insight as to why someone unrelated to your org would design malware that switched the default search to your site?

I use to work in search advertising and we've had people do this to our sites too. The malware doesn't just change the default search it also replaces the ads on our pages in your browser with their own ones. So they get the money and we get the spam and malware complaints.

There are good hackers that will likely save our world from disaster.

Then there are bad hackers out there with various motives, often monetary. Some of them make a living or get a thrill by propagating viruses.

You will notice there are companies selling software to remove viruses, like the supposed DuckDuckGo virus, for example: http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-duckduckgo.html

There are virus creators out there that take the names of legitimate companies like DuckDuckGo and StartPage, likely to trick people for their own reasons.

Let me emphasize again that DuckDuckGo and StartPage are legitimate search engines, and the reported viruses that try to benefit from respected industry names like these have nothing to do with the legitimate search services.

I never seen any malware installing ddg as the default page, but I've seen many installing startpage. Also commercial softwares with default checkbox. I cleaned one just some days ago on my girl's laptop.

Sorry, I have no way to know if you are a victim or a bad actor in the matter, but I choose to ban you from anything I touch. And I know every geeks around me do the same.

If you are indeed a victim, I'm sorry for you and hope you'll find a way to get your legitimacy back. Right now it's very bad.

I'm wary of these things, there is no way I can trust they do what they say they do without having direct access to their infrastructure anyway. And if they are getting results from Google, surely they are at the mercy google when it comes to survival.

All of the things that look like search engines get their results from Google, Bing, or (occasionally) Yandex. Building your own big search index is not something you can raise $1 million and just go do.

You can do your own search-index with 2.3 billion pages for about €300/month:

https://deusu.org

I think your project is great for how it does so much with so few resources, but most big search engines have an index which is more than 1,000X as large as yours (per document), in order to improve results.

Moz, ahrefs , majestic.. They all have built their own search index. It's not trivial but it's not Google-hard either.

All of these provide lists of backlinks. That's a bit different from providing high-quality search results. Also, I don't think that any of them have a budget as small as $1 million.

>Building your own big search index ... //

The guy who started DDG [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu] shared a lot of his solo search engine creation here. At one point at least he was running his own crawlers/index (but not IIRC exclusively). It might be instructive to search over past posts and find the details.

I don't think he was using anything like $1 million as, again IIRC, it was self funded. But this was a few years (10?) ago now.

You are right to be wary, eptcyka. We know trust is an important issue, so we back up our privacy promises with 3rd party audits. We are the only private search engine to do that.

If it helps at all Startpage was default for the Tor Browser and is still included as an option along with Disconnect, DDG [the current default on my install]. That seems like a useful endorsement.

If they're hitting google apis, they must be paying obscene amounts of money, right?

It's complicated. Google gives out free results, sometimes, if you show google's search ads. And some Google partners have grandfathered deals not available to new partners.

Hi greglindahl. StartPage has a contract with Google that allows us to use their official "Syndicated Web Search" feed. We pay them to get those results.

Startpage is recent discovery for me. I really like it. Is it possible you can share any ball park numbers, traffic, growth etc?

They have a traffic page here: https://www.startpage.com/traffic/

I'm not sure how I missed that. Thanks.

Why don't you have the same results as Google? For example some searches will return nothing in Startpage but a few results in Google. Are they intentionally limiting the quality of the feed they provide?

What do you have in place when Google decides to cut you off from the '"Syndicated Web Search" feed'?

Also seems kind of redundant, why not just go through Google?

Privacy

https://www.startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html#hmb

I've been using them for years, and switched to them full time when I gave up all things Google a few months ago. The results are better than DDG, though DDG in my opinion has a much better site design (especially under the hood; it's very clean).

I'm using Startpage on my desktop at home. I like the general idea but have noticed that it is very slow at times (enough so that I have an alternative search engine I use when I get "annoyed"). Overall it's pretty good though. Basically a privacy wrapper around Google (which of course is also likely the explanation for the slowness and a big danger as they could be hosed by Google pretty quickly).

Hi Kriro. For image search, DuckDuckGo may be a hair faster because it uses Amazon AWS servers. But other searches should be about the same speed.

Please contact us if you see this happening so we can address it.

A recent article did a speed comparison test of StartPage vs. DuckDuckGo, along with other comparisons. See: http://securityspread.com/2016/10/24/duckduckgo-startpage-20...

I think the search is not particulary slow, but since they have the new design they load some script which delays showing the results significantly (like 2 seconds). When blocking the script, searching is super fast but the pagination is broken. That's what annoys me the most.

I had startpage as my default search engine for some time.

It is pretty slow compared to google and duckduckgo, so I switched to duckduckgo.

Thank you for using private search, no matter which private search engine you use!

DuckDuckGo uses Amazon web servers so they may be just a hair bit faster for image search according to a recent comparison article. See: http://securityspread.com/2016/10/24/duckduckgo-startpage-20...

So is the concept that they are providing Google-like results with the privacy of Duck Duck Go? I have never had any issue with using Duck Duck Go.

Sometimes DDG doesn't give the most relevant results; to work around this, if I haven't found something by using DDG, I'll stick a !s in front of the query to check StartPage instead.

> !s in front

Any position works

s! works too

Hi veenified. StartPage offers actual Google search results in privacy. Google never sees you and neither do we.

We never collect personal information about our users so you break free from the "filter bubble." See: https://dontbubble.me/

Plus, we offer a free proxy with every search result so you can also view web results pages in privacy.

DuckDuckGo is also a solid search engine. We are glad you use private search, whether you use StartPage.com or another option. If we all start taking small steps to protect our privacy, we can reform the "surveillance economy"!

I haven been using Startpage for quite a while now ad my default search engine. Google results + privacy, great! On iOS you can set DDG as the default search engine, make a shortcut maybe for "!sp" and search on SP! The site could be a little quicker and some results nowadays only seem to appear only on Google but it's still great.

I use StartPage and thinks it works very well.

I like the "Proxy" function, but it's only available for search results, it would be nice if you could submit a link and use the proxy function for pages not indexed by StartPage, they could then send their crawler to that domain and the search engine would improve.

Thank you for using StartPage.com for search privacy! I will pass along your suggestion to our tech team. :-)

Does anyone know if there is a considerable difference between https://startpage.com/ and https://eu.startpage.com/ ?

I believe it's just when you get directed to their European servers. They also use us.startpage.com, as well as some other variations.

Because many users are concerned about using US services and servers, we give StartPage and Ixquick users the option to use servers outside the US.

See: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

We might also redirect to EU servers automatically in some cases. See: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

Hi. Do you mean Ixquick.eu? Ixquick.eu is sister to StartPage that delivers metasearch results, but without Google or Yahoo search results. (It used to deliver Yahoo results, too.)

We ended our contract with Yahoo for Ixquick.eu because they were reported to be working with the US government to access user information See: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/technology/startpage-to-dr...

Thanks for explaining this!

Seems like a good thing. I just hope their business model is sustainable.

Sponsored results, according to https://www.startpage.com/eng/company.html

Oh wow this is legit? I always figured it was one of those referral spam things in my analytics.

A related company: https://www.startmail.com/

There is more info on that site about the Team and Company.

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