Startpage Search Engine Output Omitting Certain Search Results?
· Reason
Startpage is a search engine that promotes itself as protecting user privacy; it gathers results via Google and Bing, but:
Visit syntagm.co.za for more information.
We submit your search to our search partners on your behalf. They never see your personal information.
You receive results that aren't based on your personal history…. We don't store your searches. We don't build profiles. Once your search is complete, it's gone.
It apparently gets over 2 million visits per day; my friend Adam Holland regularly uses it, which is how I learned about the missing results in some Startpage searches.
Here is one example, the entirety of a Startpage search for solvera "chris dinota" (I kept the white space at the bottom to show these were the only two returned results); I use this particular query because it's closely related to the original query Adam used:
And here is a Google search for solvera "chris dinota" (done using a private window, to diminish any context-based effects on the search results):
As you see, Google shows many more sources than Startpage, including a document on the Washington Post site (which accompanied a post of mine on the matter), an article in the Dallas Morning News, and a Reason-hosted copy of my Washington Post post on the subject. Bing shows similar results.
Here's a Startpage search for "pro se prisoner sought to file a belated", a phrase that appears in one of my blog posts:
And here's a Google search for the same phrase (ignore the AI overview, and see the one search result at the bottom):
I've found several other examples as well.
When I e-mailed the Startpage people about this issue, I got this response:
Thank you for reaching out, and for the detailed examples.
Startpage works with multiple search providers, including Google, to redistribute search results. Startpage does not do anything to modify the results that are served; they come directly from our search providers.
But that doesn't explain why so many sources are omitted; and when I followed up with Startpage, I got no further answer. Either they are submitting their background search engine queries in some odd way, or they are somehow oddly filtering out material.
I thought that maybe they're submitting the queries from Dutch servers, since Startpage is a Dutch company, and Google is therefore filtering out some material because of European law. But when I connect via a VPN to a Dutch host and run the Google query, the results were much like Googling from the U.S., and quite unlike the Startpage results.
In any event, the one thing that seems evident is that using Startpage will at least sometimes omit many credible search results that Google and Bing would show. I'd love to know why this is happening, but regardless of the reason why, I think Startpage users ought to be aware that this is indeed happening.
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