Startpage
I stopped using Google some time ago. Since my Firefox Phoenix days I have blocked cookies from *google.com. I suspect all search engines use cookies to one degree or another, including the alleged “privacy” search engines.
With respect to claims of privacy, to my knowledge none of these search engines have been independently audited.
About the same time that Firefox 41.0 was released, the Startpage folks decided to use JavaScript.
Before this change, a search result page displayed at the bottom of each page the numerical links for subsequent search result pages. Without JavaScript enabled those links now no longer appear.
Despite all of the alleged positive privacy claims, I always had an uncomfortable feeling about startpage.com because of the requirement to use cookies to save search preferences rather than define those preferences through URL options. Now the designers want to use JavaScript — the bane of the web.
Because Startpage is an aggregator search engine that relies on google.com, I have grown discontented with Startpage search results. Startpage search results have grown frustrating. More often than not the results contain a lot of noise and duplicate results. More often than not the search engine algorithms are designed to guess what I want rather than provide specifically what I requested. The shotgun approach.
While I had been alternating between duckduckgo and startpage, now I just use the former.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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