Startpage: The World’s Most Private Search Engine

With so many individuals scouring the online every day searching for useful, quick, and correct info, it is smart that there are plenty of great search engines that may assist join individuals with the assets they want.

Regardless of greater than a dozen commendable search engines like google defecting or merging into larger gamers through the years, there are some which have continued to face up to the check of time and appeal to thousands and thousands of searches each month.

A kind of is Startpage, a lesser-known search engine that has been thriving for greater than 20 years – and supplying the web with search outcomes akin to the main search engine, Google.

What Is Startpage?

Startpage is a Dutch search engine that’s propped up by its robust privateness options, but additionally proudly stands by the standard of its search outcomes as among the many finest on the planet.

That’s as a result of the search engine actually serves Google Search outcomes to its customers (and pays Google an undisclosed amount of money to take action) whereas defending person knowledge and eradicating all types of monitoring to make sure most privateness.

The search engine is assessed as a proxy website, since customers can use the platform’s Nameless View to view search outcomes via a proxy server and add much more privateness safety to their expertise in the event that they’d like.

What started as an online listing in 2002 would evolve a number of other ways over the subsequent few years – together with mirroring a website it might ultimately merge with, Ixquick – earlier than quickly changing into its personal distinctive search engine entity that started strictly serving Google’s search outcomes with out the personalization or advert monitoring.

Startpage and Ixquick would merge in 2016 beneath the Startpage identify, and, regardless of some preliminary privateness issues surrounding a scarcity of transparency initially of the merger, Startpage introduced the coupling of the businesses wouldn’t change the model’s mission to guard person privateness and nonetheless ship high-quality search outcomes.

And being headquartered within the Netherlands has frequently allowed Startpage to avoid any invasive legal guidelines that will put customers in danger whereas nonetheless serving top-quality search outcomes.

It’s additionally a multi-language search engine, permitting searches in 82 completely different languages whereas additionally providing a number of verticals for looking particularly for pictures and movies.

Who Makes use of Startpage?

Whereas Startpage is on the market for use by anybody on the planet without spending a dime (as long as they use one of many supported languages to go looking), there are some more-likely customers of the search engine, which has emerged as a formidable participant during the last seven years.

The first (and possibly most blatant) group of individuals opting to make use of Startpage recurrently are those that are involved or obsessed with privateness.

They might get pleasure from Google and the expertise it gives, however don’t help what can appear overly invasive in terms of capturing and using person knowledge – one thing Google admits it does, however allegedly within the identify of enhancing the search expertise.

On the opposite aspect of that, there are additionally individuals who simply don’t care if the adverts they see are focused or not. And if they’ll keep away from having their knowledge taken by an organization, they do.

Some of the well-liked causes others choose out of utilizing Google and search for a special, extra obscure search engine to make use of of their every day lives is they’re, roughly, typically not a fan of Google.

This could possibly be as a result of Google is without doubt one of the richest corporations on the planet, has been recognized to tip-toe quite a lot of ethics tightropes, and, as a pioneer of the expertise trade, can simply appear extra involved about producing income than it does enhancing humankind.

No matter the reason being for somebody searching for an alternate search engine to make use of as an alternative of Google, it means a possibility for all the opposite platforms within the house.

What Is Startpage Good For?

Startpage is nice at doing each of its foremost aims as a enterprise.

It’s a search engine. The job of a search engine is to assist individuals discover what they’re searching for – oftentimes with restricted info or path – rapidly, simply, and precisely.

It’s principally recreating the search expertise of the preferred search engine on the planet – and its top-of-the-line expertise and algorithms – with none person personalization.

Startpage has a recipe for achievement if it may well successfully present one thing else customers need as well as: privateness.

The idea and upholding of privateness is Startpage’s worth proposition as a model, so it should do that nicely to take care of a decent fame.

So, though customers might miss out on that extra personalised total search expertise at the price of privateness safety, they’re nonetheless getting a high-quality expertise that’s per the standard of different search engines like google.

In fact, should you add your location to the platform for some elevated personalization, you’ll get that even-more-useful search expertise and nonetheless have very restricted knowledge taken and saved.

Is Startpage As Good As Google?

Whereas Startpage is principally a privacy-bound regurgitator of Google Search outcomes, it will depend on what standards you’d use to contemplate if Startpage is nearly as good – or higher than – Google.

The person expertise is completely different in quite a lot of methods, and since there isn’t a personalization for the outcomes or sort of outcomes served to a person, Startpage is doubtlessly lacking part of the equation that has helped Google turn out to be the highly effective tech firm that it’s.

Startpage should serve adverts to its customers – it’s a for-profit firm that does generate income from search adverts – however these adverts are served strictly from contextual clues given by a person’s search question, not from historic or habits knowledge collected by the engine (like Google and different well-liked search engines like google).

So it’s actually concerning the high quality of adverts served on the search engine outcomes pages (SERPs), not simply in the event that they exist on these platforms.

Startpage additionally doesn’t help Google’s Featured Snippet function – that’s, the “scraping” of internet pages and content material to serve particular excerpts from internet pages instantly on the high of its SERPs.

Startpage does, nonetheless, present its personal informational breakout on the best aspect of the SERP similar to Google does, and it’s largely Wikipedia-generated info that builds out its Information Panel (additionally similar to Google).

Google is an promoting firm producing tons of of billions of {dollars} annually.

And, whereas Startpage generates cash from promoting too, it’s producing far lower than Google – nearer to 7 to 10 million a 12 months.

Startpage Vs. DuckDuckGo

Startpage isn’t the one well-liked search engine propping up its privateness safety as a search engine, both.

DuckDuckGo has been doing so since 2010.

This privacy-focused search engine’s greatest distinction in comparison with Startpage is the way it generates its search outcomes.

Whereas Startpage faucets into Google’s API and provides an identical expertise to Google with out the personalization, DuckDuckGo provides its personal distinctive search outcomes and platform expertise.

Along with its personal proprietary internet crawler, DuckDuckGo makes use of quite a lot of different websites’ APIs to reply search queries, in addition to different search companions like Bing, to make sure it’s delivering a positive expertise and good outcomes.

In comparison with Startpage, DuckDuckGo has definitely gotten much more publicity and progress in reputation during the last decade, however that goes past the services and products themselves.

This contains variations in advertising budgets, firm sizes, and a lot extra.

However DuckDuckGo nonetheless holds about 2% of the search market share, whereas Startpage is holding down a sliver (0.06% in America).

Total Outlook On Startpage The Search Engine

The thought might not sound groundbreaking and even obligatory, however Startpage is a simple, high quality search engine providing a safer expertise than different platforms whereas capturing digital zero person knowledge.

Whereas it received’t be seemingly that Startpage strikes in as a respectable menace to Google anytime quickly, will probably be attention-grabbing to see how the search engine’s privateness mannequin continues to assist it reach a aggressive house that now very a lot contains social media platforms, retail websites, and a lot extra.

For an expertise targeted on privateness that can also be devoted to delivering high quality search outcomes, strive Startpage.

It feels quite a bit like what a search engine must be like: sensible however basic and never too invasive.

You simply might prefer it.

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