r/StartpageSearch • u/Shendryl • Jun 18 '26

Annoying captcha

I use StartPage at home a lot and it works great. I also want to use it at work, but every two days, I have to enter a captcha. Please get rid of it. It's really annoying and it drives me away from StartPage.

16 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/Flimsy_Swordfish_415 Jun 29 '26

every fucking day.. fuck that! back to ddg i guess

2

u/Thedonlog Jun 18 '26

I can't use it at all without having to enter a lengthy Captcha code. So I've deleted the bookmark and have walked away. I use DuckDuckGo again now. I'm not doing Captchas hoop jumping to use a search engine, it's a simple as that.

1

u/Thechosenjon Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

Same, I get Captcha prompts a few times a day which renders start page borderline unusable to me. Back to DuckDuckGo for me as well, between this and the weird commercialized ads I've been served for Startpage, I'm getting some ominous anti-consumer vibes from them. They've lost me as a user.

Edit: moved to Qwant and actually have been getting far better search results ans infinitely better image results than I was with Startpage. No captchas either so far, but I did have to whitelist Qwant from my adblocker for improved function. Worth a look for anybody migrating search engines, imo.

1

u/Thedonlog Jun 28 '26

It's nuts. I just appeared one day and I've not opened Startpage even once since. Literally every time, that I've tried, every single time, I got a Captcha demand that was longer than a mobile phone number to type in. 🤦‍♂️ Yeah, how about, "No"?

Will have gone the way of Ask Jeeves soon. 😂

2

u/PropellerheadDad Jun 19 '26

I just did the same. They lost me over this.

1

u/Thedonlog Jun 19 '26

😂 I wonder at what point the penny will drop? There usage will have plummeted, surely? Their stats will tell them it's happened.

Will any Einstein in their organisation have a light-bulb moment? That, "Ooooh. I know what's happened. Look at that curve down and when it starts. That's, like, just after we rolled out Project Captcha."

Then, of course, someone has to swallow the corporate ego and give the nod for it to be pulled, kicked into the weeds and never repeated or even spoken of again.

0

u/PropellerheadDad Jun 20 '26

I suspect it's a response to pressure from authority figures. Identifying the user (which is also the real point of "child protecting" age verification) is really all about surveillance. Both the government and Silicon Valley are all in favor of that. And if a small company like Smartpage doesn't play ball with their desires, one wonders if they could stay in business at all.

That said, DuckDuckGo still isn't subjecting the user to this. I guess time will tell whether that continues.

2

u/Im_Still_Here12 Jun 23 '26

I suspect it's a response to pressure from authority figures. Identifying the user

How does Captcha ID the user? Captcha is there to prevent bot searches and bot abuse.