Taylor's lazy perspectives on anything have always concluded as "choose your villain." While casually glossing the issues with everyone's darling DDG, Startpage is slammed because System1. Guilt by association, 2½ years obsolete: https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/ Though he provides an undated update down at the bottom, here are the real links for those tiny URLs: https://support.startpage.com/index...hat-does-this-mean-for-my-privacy-protections https://support.startpage.com/index...sses-the-investment-from-privacy-one--system1 it's still not good enough: "At the end of the day, an American ad-tech company that seeks to 'gather as much data as possible' is still the majority owner of Startpage, a search engine that could be used to collect data." Why bother mentioning, so do many others in his "choose your villain" review model? No doubt, DDG gathers only a little bit of data, every now and then in case they need more coffee at the office. As well, the "delisted Startpage" PrivacyTools.io link is 404 'cause Startpage now on the top of its list... If some ad-tech affiliate garners from an unprofiled search term that some one from some where did a search for a petunia doily pattern in homemaker forums (you know who you are), who cares? If they can leverage that data into some cheddar, more power to 'em. Because, but for the cost of an ISP, the WWW is... FREE. As is one's freedom to choose paywall sites. Ultimately, for any U.S. citizen, the privacy needed isolates searches from some alphabet bureaucracy autocracy for wanting info on the monkeypox with -CDC -FDA -NIH -WHO in the search field. Startpage KB pull quote: "Our company is based in The Netherlands, Europe. US jurisdiction does not apply to us, at least not directly. Any request or demand from ANY government (including the US) to deliver user data, will be thoroughly checked by our lawyers, and we will not comply unless the law which actually applies to us would undeniably require it from us. And even in that hypothetical situation, we refer to our first point: we don't even have any user data to give." (Emphasis mine.) Cheers.
@Surt -- Oh joy! I just found a petunia doily pattern HERE via Startpage. But the real test -- would Startpage find my 12 teaching websites that have been online for just over 25 years now? It found 3 of them & QWANT only found 1. So I replaced QWANT with Startpage. I did so reluctantly. "QWANT" is a Klingon cuss word and, therefore, is a much more mysterious name than "Startpage" (meh).
Interesting. Can you rank the best Search Engines for your websites? I tried using UBO to check DDG and StartPage with about the usual settings, obviously identical research (I used my daughter's name):
True. But one would have to be running a bone-stock install of Windows or, worse yet, a retail Windows PC and using Bing and Edge to be subject to that kind of abuse and no one here runs as such. On the other hand, google mobile devices (aka "phones") and chromebooks are nightmares.
Does anything find all 12? "Startpage delivers Google search results via our proprietary personal data protection technology." It stand to reason some stuff won't make it through to their results page, though it's doubtful your sites would fall into that. I would suggest you try google itself, too. If you have play.google.com (Yes. For PCs, too.) ogs.google.com adservcie.google.com blocked (firewall or a blend of adblock lists) and wear nitrile gloves while typing and clicking, you should be safe for the few, brief times you test. You should also search in Yahoo and Bing. How many of your potpourri dozen do they, and google, find? @ ALL I failed to make clear in previous posts here, I think Startpage is the best for those who want google without the google nonsense. Spartan posted in #2, "...nothing even comes close to Google," and digmor crusher in #4, "If you want the best just use Google, nothing else comes close." I agree. Other search engines have merit, of course, and the many sites that review and test them will provide the info needed to "choose your villain." As well, your own experiences, well posted in this topic so far. In my own experience, google class results are all I've ever needed in the past 10-15 years. I miss doing CompuServe queries to find drivers that didn't blue screen Windows NT...
@Sampei Nihira -- Wow -- UBO blocked several Startpage items whereas it only blocked ZERO items for DDG!!! @Surt - "Does anything find all 12?" I'm sure that ALL search engines find all 12 of my sites, but their ranking is likely too low to list in the first several pages of hits. I didn't bother to keep looking. Nor will most folks. Even so, my sites draw a composite of 30,000 or more "unique visits" monthly, which isn't bad for theology-teaching sites that I pay to keep online but no longer maintain. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ AT WHOEVER -- I have decided to use MetaGer as my steady-eddy search engine for now. It draws "hits" from several engines (Google isn't one of them), has good privacy, & gives excellent relevancy in its hits.
@bellgamin Both MetaGer and SearX (perhaps you never considered) are two superb reasons for ditching Google. Good riddance. Chances are you'll miss Google less than it will you ($$$). Currently, and as it stands, Google is light years ahead of any proposed competition with its Google Images (with the exception of Yandex) and Google Maps. Other than that...
I laugh at everyone that thinks their search engine usage is private. Use the one that gives the results you want and know that this will be as good as it gets.
any engine uses some kind of "telemetry" to improve, more or less anonymous, or to gain money to survive.
They are all pretty bad and getting worse and less relevant by the day. That said, bing is good for image searches. Everything else, whatever. Mrk
Laugh is okay but please don't snicker & chortle. I don't think MetaGer is private-est but it IS private-er than googuldy.
A new option for people that want to pay for their privacy? https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta
No, snicker & chortle are for people that carry a smartphone everywhere they go and worry about privacy on a search engine on their PC.
Full analysis. The search engine I trust the least (aside from the usual known ones) is StartPage (custom setting in the link): https://forum.adguard.com/index.php?threads/startpage-tracking-adblock-users.20202/ I'm staying with DDG.
Five year old forum posts. Thanks for keeping us up to date. As of today: "DuckDuckGo still makes money from advertising...based on the keywords you search for, which aren't connected to your personal data" https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/duckduckgo-what-to-know-about-the-private-google-search-rival/ - May 25, 2022 • Just like Startpage does it. None of Sampei's untrustworthy stuff here. Oh, wait... If an anonymized google search service isn't one's need, bellgamin's choice of MetaGer is The Way To Go, IMHO. Though served solely from Germany, results might take some time to render in some areas. But good things come to those who wait. And lest we forget the final truth: Cheers.
The js is still present today. As you can see from the UBO request log. Can you explain the purpose/utility of that js?
It's above my pay grade, but if I took wild guess, I'd proffer it's to make money from advertising. As well, since you live in Italy, why you would choose a google anonymize search service with jurisdiction in the USA? That's rhetorical, no need to expound on that. You fail to catch the irony in my reference to timing. You trust DDG for making money and don't trust Startpage for the same, both for a long time. And that's it for me. But, before I go: HTTPS://SEARCHENGINE.PARTY/ I think they could have used a less intense shade of red. FYI: The page is undated (a common practice on teh webbuhnetz) but the gitlab repository RSS feed was last updated on Sept. 25, 2021. Nitrohorse's last activity, eight months ago.
MetaGer is quite speedy on my aging laptop (I'm in Hawaii). Besides, I never Met a Ger I didn't like. ~ OT Remarks Removed ~
Salutations/Greetings, @Xlll Or anyone, who may know is there Orion Browser for Windows ? And what is your thoughts/opinion on kagi search engine ?
I gave Orion a spin roughly 6 -- 8 months ago and really liked it until I found out the version of Chromium it was based on was dangerously outdated imo and uninstalled it immediately. As the potential for software updates go, maybe things have changed drastically for the better. Iridium, Slimjet, and Maxthon seemed way better at maintaining a current Chromium version and seemed to be safer and more viable options at the time. YMMV.
No, macOS & iOS only: https://browser.kagi.com/?new=yes#download_sec Orion is based on WebKit, not on Chrome: https://browser.kagi.com/?new=yes
