Startpage is now owned by an advertising company
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As a side note - the whole digital advertising industry reminds me a little of the financial engineering on Wall Street of the last decade. Doesn't add any new value to society - and in many ways actually harms it - but makes so much money that companies build their whole strategy around it.
I've heard this argument a lot but it's hard for me to agree.
Saying that ad arbitrage doesn't "add value" is kind of like arguing that someone with a media-buying/sales role doesn't "add value" because they're just sitting in the middle taking a paycheck/commission.
Partnering with ad arbitragers isn't much different than outsourcing internal media buying/sales roles to an agency to increase reach or fill-rate.
Your point about ads being annoying to end-users isn't unique to digital. Advertisements on all mediums have always annoyed end-users. Certain implementations like full-page takeovers & loading 100 ads on a page are the most annoying. Generally it's the publisher's fault for the bad UX.
This is untrue. Historically speaking, print advertisements in many markets (even when restricted to English-speaking ones) could and did serve multiple purposes, including the relation of interesting topics and stories--ones that certainly were brought-to-you-by or even featured products in them, but worked in concert with the material of the publlication to entertain and inform the reader.
It wasn't until the 1960s, approximately, that print advertisements turned into the screaming look-at-me garbage that they have continued to amplify in volume to this day.
Advertising does not have to be a pustule on society, but we have chosen to allow such.
A favourite telling of this is Hamilton Holt's 1909 lecture at UC Berkeley, published in book form.
It's a quick and informative read.
Is the entire point. Yes, advertising might add value to other parties. It's almost certainly net negative overall.
1. Ad arbitrage has a role.
2. The blame of annoying/bad UX is unfairly being deferred to arbitragers. It's usually the implementation that annoys users, and that's generally the publisher's fault.
I don't know anything about System1's ethics and I'm not trying defend them by any means, but I don't agree with an argument that X company is bad because they've participated in arbitrage.
That in no way implies I approve or like what they do - I run ad block wherever possible. Just refuse to believe in falsehoods trendy among rich, Urban tech savvy HN-ers, whose reality is far removed from the truth. Some estimates peg the value of "free" internet services, like Google search, Gmail, Facebook, etc at $30/month. That's a lot of value, if you ask me
In the modern era and with the corpus of data available to them, advertisers are psychological attackers and should be treated as such.
The company you work at creates a product. How would people find out about it without any advertising? Keep in mind that even just having a sign in front of a store is advertising.
Probably a very minority view on HN, but I'd like to outlaw and treat as hostile all forms of advertising, except:
+ Yellow Pages style classified magazines and sites - Like old-school Yellow Pages, or the classifieds in the back of old magazines. When I want a new product, I can open the site or book and look for one. Easy.
+ Flat, silent and static magazine and newspaper style ads, locally served.
+ Branding on the packaging.
+ Shop signage akin to say the sixties or earlier - sign on frontage only. Illumination only whilst store open, and it's after lighting up time. No 20m KFC neon topped poles outside. No floodlights 24/7.
Nowt else. I'm fucking sick of the advertising arms race.
Those around here old enough to remember Computer Shopper [1] and other similar phone-book sized ad catalogues might agree that those were an example of a form of advertising which met at least three of the four mentioned criteria, some even might have met the fourth (being honesty). The model seemed to work back in those days given the 30-year lifespan of the magazine, the advent of the 'net followed by the decline of paper magazines eventually did it in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_(US_magazine)
Computer Shopper - the UK version lasted about as long, Autotrader and Exchange and Mart are exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Advertising as a positive, and nicely self-contained - you bought Autotrader when you needed a new car or van. Sure beats retargeting chasing you with the same ad for days because you briefly read a page on some silly product.
It was better then.
This "oh but what about a sign?!" is some /r/iamverysmart strawman junk and I would hope that you would be better than that.
There is nothing wrong with non-tracking advertizing -- looking solely at the content of the page ad is embedded it, or at the search term for the search engine is enough to let people know about new products, and has no negative social implications.
Edit: definitely not-fine: > Startpage is now (partly?) owned by System1, a company which...
> has developed a pre-targeting platform that identifies and unlocks consumer intent across channels including social, native, email, search, market research and lead generation rather than relying solely on what consumers enter into search boxes
To ensure that our mission and privacy practices do not change, the investment includes covenants that ensure Startpage’s founders in the Netherlands will retain complete control over all privacy-related decisions.
If you’re interested, you can read more about the investment in this letter from our Founder and CEO Robert E.G. Beens: https://preview.redd.it/zher3ok6pct3†1.jpg
To start, we’ve addressed some existing comments and questions with the information below. I’d also suggest reading this open letter about the acquisition from Startpage Founder and CEO Robert E.G. Beens (https://preview.redd.it/zher3ok6pct31.jpg).
- To ensure that our mission and privacy practices do not change, the investment includes covenants that ensure Startpage’s founders in the Netherlands will retain complete control over all privacy-related decisions.
- Robert still has final say over all product decisions, and Startpage will always be headquartered in the Netherlands.
- System1 invested in Startpage because they recognize increasing consumer demand for privacy-focused tools, not because they plan to alter Startpage’s core mission in any way.
- We will never compromise or weaken Startpage’s industry-leading privacy policy.
- We will not depart from Startpage’s core business model, which has been profitable since 2006. We make money with contextual ads (based solely on your search query) vs. other search engines that make money with behavioral ads (based on your personal profile and browsing history).
- The purpose of this investment is to allow Startpage to reach more users worldwide and advance our mission of making safe, private search available to everyone.
[1] https://www.qwant.com/ [2] https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-mon... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
https://news.microsoft.com/europe/features/qwant-and-microso... -- dated May 22, 2019
- Startpage was founded in 2006, in the Netherlands by Robert E.G. Beens and David Bodnick the founder of metasearch engine Ixquick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com)
VS. DuckDuckGo (DDG) was founded in 2008, in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania by Gabriel Weinberg who previously founded Names Database (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_Database).
- HQ'd in the Netherlands ensuring worldwide users are protected by stringent EU and Dutch privacy legislation
VS. DDG based in the United States
- Startpage provides Google results
VS. DDG provides primarily Yahoo and BING results
- Startpage offers Anonymous View, a proprietary feature that lets users browse their search results privately via a protective proxy
VS. DDG does not have this feature, but has done well to design an intuitive and attractive experience.
---
You haven't described an advantage with this reply. Or, at least, reasoning why you believe it's an advantage.
Plus star page has super useful anonimized view. It's essentially anon proxy built into search page. It's useful if you have to go look trough doggy websites.
This doesn't help. A lot of people believe things which don't always hold up to scrutiny.
When you asked for support for the assertion, it was given, but you continued to disagree.
However, for people who prefer Google, using Google results is an advantage. You seem to be working under some stronger definition of advantage (for example: "an advantage is only an advantage of everyone agrees it is am advantage"), and such advantages are rare enough to be an unreasonable requirement.
>When you asked for support for the assertion, it was given, but you continued to disagree.
The "support" that the other poster submitted was: "Most people believe (at least as far as I know them) ..."
I don't suspect many folks would accept that as anything more than anecdotal.
>However, for people who prefer Google, using Google results is an advantage. You seem to be working under some stronger definition of advantage (for example: "an advantage is only an advantage of everyone agrees it is am advantage"), and such advantages are rare enough to be an unreasonable requirement.
Look, I get it, you like Google. You work for Google. That's all well and good. You're argument(s) toward me come off as a bit defensive, however. There was a baseless assertion given in response to someone asking for information and I called that into question.
My arguments here aren't for or against Google, but in support of substantive dissemination of information which the original comment I replied to was not.
Startpage has an advantage over ddg because some people prefer Google search results.
Equally, ddg has an advantage over startpage because some people prefer being results or prefer to not use Google.
It doesn't matter if even a single person prefers Google to bing. For that single person, startpage has an advantage. The reverse of this is again, also true. Anecdotal evidence is, in this case, more than enough to justify the assertion.[0] That is, unless you're working under some unusually strong definition of advantage. Which I'll note you still haven't provided. Instead of, perhaps, saying "yes I don't consider a relative advantage that applies only to a potentially small group of people to be an advantage", you took the opportunity to make irrelevant attacks on my character.
[0]: if you want non anecdotal evidence though: both have users. This implies each has a relative advantage over the other to some subset of the population, otherwise one would take all the users from that other.
Of the group of people I know, that are even aware that there are other search engines than google (most people just think google homepage is "the web/internet"), most of them think that google is better than bing.
Is it true ? Depends on whom and for for what. For technical questions i mostly get similar results. But for local questions (i am in small country in eu), google is a lot better than bing.
Startpage goes beyond search with Anonymous View, our private browsing proxy that lets users view websites within their search results privately. Over the last 13 years, we’ve grown to become the world’s most private search engine protecting users’ data rights with Dutch and EU protective legislation.
Try a private search and our Anonymous View browsing feature at www.Startpage.com
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...
> Every single search request from our website and extension is encrypted locally on the client and proxied through our service, stripping away your public IP address ensuring that only the search provider is able to decrypt and see your query without any knowledge of who you are.
> The results are returned to you through our proxy and are rendered locally on your machine only using javascript running on your machine.
I haven't used it, so I don't know what their results are like, but you seem to be mistaken about the privacy.