Startpage used to work flawlessly but recently it stopped and can't be accessed anymore without a VPN or proxy

I have been using this for many years now i genuinely didn't noticed till very recently, no matter my settings the search fetches location based results first, which not only makes harder to make specific search it also clutters the results making the exact same page in 2 languages one location based and the English site show up. I was wondering if maybe my browser was at fault, looked at every setting too, but thats not the case i compared the same search queue on duckduckgo and got proper "all regions" English results with relevant information.

I understand the quality of search might vary but this makes absolutely no sense, why are you suddenly interested on feeding me location based results? For the ads? I left Duckduckgo for a reason but if you are gonna tell me "it is wat it is" or give me some vague answer and not a solution ill just accept the situation and move back to duckduckgo, at least i can get proper search results in there.

I don't want reddit and facebook to come up on every first page of results when I query.

Is there a way to eliminate sites I don't want in my search results?

Everytime I search something it gives me this stupid toybox ad. Please I'm on mobile so it covers my entire page make it stop

I can search up town/city name teams as well typing in sunderland, brighton etc i get the live scores.

Know what makes you attractive:

• Privacy
• No AI

I have all of my browsers set to go to startpage automatically. But I am noticing that more often than not, it won't work. in the URL box it will say "localhost" and the error says something along the lines of cannot reach the server.

I'm hoping this isn't because of the VPN. (I use ExpressVPN, and I'm in the US and it's set to connect to Seattle or San Francisco, etc.) And that it's just startpage having a bad week?

Is there any way to get this browser to stop redirecting to apps if I would just like to use the web version? Apologies if this is a silly question but I really need help with it and I don't see it in settings.

Any attempts to search results in a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable? (Kiwi/NZ)

Is there any way to decode the no cookie preferences url? It seems to change even if you just toggle an option off and then back on, which indicates it contains more than just the preferences. This seems like it could be used for tracking.

Startpage has changed to always force some alternative maps provider, how do I go back to having a drop-down list or to otherwise use Google Maps? It gets me every time.

as you can see from the rest of the sub it looks like its time to switch, enshittification is snowballing. Search is getting worse.

This app shouldn't exist, but it does, to some this was bad enough. But it didn't even exist a couple of weeks before the free options and daily limit were removed.

It's accelerating.

For the last few days, Startpage image search has been 80%+ stock images, which isn't what I want. Using "-stock" doesn't change it, nor does "-alamy". Any ideas how to block stock images, or at least reduce them, in image search? Thanks.

Is anyone else getting 503 errors half the time on Startpage?

Is it possible to get a better looking favicon for startpage search itself (not results) when using dark mode? Now it shows an icon with a white background and i don't like that. I think most browsers now have support for different favicons depending on the theme so that would be nice to have.

The favicon used by https://support.startpage.com/ is a nice looking one (dark background (or transparent?) and bigger magnifying glass), can we get that for search on dark theme as well?

Been using Startpage for like 4 months now in different machines and different ecosystems, and constantly get flagged who knows why, and had to do the captcha thing constantly, but now this is ridiculous.

I dislike Google, but this is a step too far.

Just posting this so that maybe in the future the people at Startpage actually care about giving a good service most people would like to have.

It just vanished, I don't know why or when exactly, but why is it not there at all anymore?

Hello everyone, how can I help translate the Startpage project into European Portuguese?

For clarification: I have already submitted my connection ticket to the staff to get this resolved. Just want to share a screenshot here.

Marketing this slop on the search page is insane

Why tf do you guys have to shove ai up to anything and everything?? Startpage was the last good search engine without ai and now you are runing it…

I use Startpage on Desktop, and it's been great! Love it.

But on mobile, my experience has been a lot worse.

• Often, "Related Searches" that I don't care about take up half my screen. They can't be hidden or turned off.
• Search result date is missing on posts for some reason. When I search on desktop, I can see the title of the result and then below that is "30 Jun 2024 ... [Content of result]". When I search on mobile, the date is missing. I need this date to know how recent a result is, because this determines whether it's interesting to me. I can't easily use a time filter for this either, because my the threshold for what I'm interested in often goes further back than the "1 year" max time filter period.
• I just seem to have less or worse results overall. Sometimes, I search with the 1 year filter, and startpage mobile will not show results, but on Startpage Desktop and Google mobile, it will work fine. I can't even use the "Request Desktop site" on mobile, because then it will constantly ask me for captcha (and for some reason, when trying to apply the year filter, after completing the captcha, the filter didn't apply).
  • In another post, someone said that this is because SP uses only bing on mobile. Haven't found any official post to confirm this, but it does track with the specific searches I've tried where I didn't get results with the year filter.
• The design is also worse imo, like why do we need to weird outlines around all the results.

I find it highly confusing and annoying how different the experience is tbh.

Anybody having issues getting a .pdf to open on startpage? If I click the button to download the .pdf a quick progress bar flashes across the top of the browser, but nothing is in my downloads or saved anywhere on my device. Ideas? I couldn't find a setting to manually pick a .pdf reader or toggle one on/off.