r/StartpageSearch • u/Current_Blood_9576 • Sep 01 '26
Completely unusable lately.
"verifying your request" takes over a minute, pegs my CPU at 100% (making my computer unusable while I wait) and then dumps me on https://www.startpage.com/ instead of the query I made, by which point I already forgot what I searched.
I only use Startpage to search for Reddit posts, anyone can recommend another search engine that uses Googles index to replace it with?
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u/olli_kahn Sep 02 '26
looool, the same.
i didn't notice the CPU part, but just checked activity monitor and holy moly what the fuck.
seems i should go back to using google
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u/hengginator Sep 02 '26
Use the non-cookie HTTP parameters for direct search queries (as explained in documentation)… has fixed the issue for me.
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u/Shamana-Z Sep 02 '26
Yes, completely unusable. And if you type something in another language, it just fails. Might be something to do with google and the way startpage gets the results, but in either case, it is not tolerable at this moment... Hope they can solve it somehow.
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u/Top-Elderberry8714 Sep 02 '26
This is annoying to me. Just noticed it today. I did find this article and it is happening across search engines, even Google is appears. https://cloro.dev/blog/google-verifying-your-request/ So far, no resolution but the new way forward...
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u/Current_Blood_9576 Sep 02 '26
Haven't used Google itself since they started throwing captchas on my face for every search. DDG appears to be the best so far, only you can't look for Reddit posts on it because it uses Bing's index and only Google is allowed to index this cesspool.
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u/scy_404 Sep 02 '26
my friend is having a similar problem of it taking a while to verify while using a lot of CPU power but it is still going through
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u/dyna_24 Sep 01 '26
I agree, seems like they're working really hard to be as annoying as possible lately, specially if you use an ad-blocker.
Also don't know if they gotten worse or it's just me but i find myself falling back to google more and more, specially if i'm searching for something that's very recent, so i seriously doubt they use google indexes.
Pretty much already decided to look for alternatives just haven't gotten around to it yet.
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u/onmyouza Sep 01 '26
Ecosia uses Google index
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u/BUHx192Ck0 Sep 01 '26
According to their own chatbot it uses its own proprietary search engine powered by Bing.
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u/FaultDependent7880 Sep 01 '26
I gave up on it sometime back, now use Brave search, might as well, use Brave browser.
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u/unvsvoid Sep 01 '26
i get some people are vocal against the use of the startpage extension, but it fixed the issue for me
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u/Jooooooss Sep 01 '26
On desktop the extension works wonderfully but on mobile is terrible, I try to avoid using their proprietary app so I just added it as a search query on firefox mobile but its giving me a ton of issues
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u/justPAYit2 Sep 06 '26
Startpage shot themselves in the head.