Startpage.com Going Downhill
I suspected this would happen.
Some months ago startpage.com was sold to System1. An advertising company. Promises were issued about protecting user privacy. Nobody seemed to notice that no promises were made about advertising.
Recently I performed a search request from the Firefox search box. The resulting page greeted me with three menus that took most of the screen on my Lenovo T400 14 inch laptop screen. The menus were Any time, All regions, and Filters.
Eventually I found the problem. I needed to configure NoScript to allow the bane of the web for startpage.com. After that configuration the menus collapsed to drop-down menus.
Never before have I needed to enable JavaScript with startpage.com. For any search engine. Why is JavaScript needed in a search engine?
WTF territory.
I continued my search. I noticed the first three results were advertisements. I had never seen that before.
I understand the advertising for generating revenues. The ads easily could be off to the side. Showing ads as an inline search result?
Perhaps a search engine should — I don’t know — return search results?
WTF territory.
The recent changes are called a tipping point. The straw that broke the camel’s back. I long have disliked that a cookie was required to render a decent page layout and sane preferences. Now with JavaScript and the inline advertisements I’ll be using that search engine less, perhaps not at all.
The web continues to devolve into a well used septic tank.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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