When searching from the Startpage website, the search phrase is private, meaning the search phrase is not visible in the web address or URL after searching. But when searching Startpage from the address bar, it's not private and visible in the web address/URL.
Is there any way to make search terms private when searching using Startpage from the address bar? Thanks.
For every single thing I search, it genuinely takes like 15-30 whole seconds, every time. It's so annoying that I have gone back to Google for the time being.
I get that it is probably some bot/spam prevention thing going on, but why does it have to be so slow? Other sites have different ways to prevent request spamming, such as Anubis or Clodflare, and it seems crazy to me that a search site, which is supposed to be as fast as reliable as possible, is this slow because of it.
Is there anything I can do about it to make it any faster, or should I just move on to something else permanently? I'm using Firefox on Linux
No I'm not a bot, and no I'm not in a "commercial environment".
I might not allow every piece of trash javascript on every page on the internet to run by default, but that does not make me either a bot or a malicious user either.
If SP wants to run 300 JS actions from unknown domains for their "security checks", then they'd better be clear about that (so I can consider unblocking it on my side), BEFORE they go banning longtime users that have brought them significant revenue over the years via browser partner customized search links and so on.
I really am on my last nerve with this site.
More often than not they are forcing me to wait anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds to get a result now and if it goes beyond 10s I just send the query to DDG instead which gives me an INSTANT response. 🙄🙄
What should I switch to?
Edit: Thanks for all the info! I decided to go with Brave as it is the most recommended here. It's sad to see startpage getting unusable. I said to myself that if they don't change the process by the end of the month, I'll abandon the engine in favor of another one. Well that month arrived. Bye startpage. Thanks for making my life worse.
This isn't a situation of just one or two links for a topic.
An entire subject's matter is completely missing from StartPage, despite it having Federal, State and international case history that is active and ongoing (slowly).
Here's Startpage:
Not one of those results is relevant to the search. There are no more results.
Here's DuckDuckGo:
Every result is spot on relevant, and there are tons of them, as expected. The search query is what someone that was curious about the person having been mentioned "hey, search for this" would realistically search for. The results exclude "Samantha" because there are very few mentions of that person (who is/was really the mistress) outside of social media past stuff, which generally doesn't return in search results.
In other words, the DDG search best represents what would have more weighting due to how much information there is that mentions the term "Russell Armand" and disregarding the others to lower priority results. Exactly as a search engine always has behaved.
We don't think the subject is the problem.
For example, if we tweak the search query:
All of a sudden it's finding tons of stuff.
This means Startpage is treating the terms as an explicit "AND" rather than an implied "OR" where whatever part of the query holds the most weight, drives the return result.
The problem is that there doesn't appear to be an obvious way to override this behavior. Google (which we don't actively use) offers advanced search options to do exactly this. The other engines seem to understand it by default.
