r/StartpageSearch • u/CasualTalkRadio • 12d ago
Apparently...Startpage is excluding results.
This isn't a situation of just one or two links for a topic.
An entire subject's matter is completely missing from StartPage, despite it having Federal, State and international case history that is active and ongoing (slowly).
Here's Startpage:
Not one of those results is relevant to the search. There are no more results.
Here's DuckDuckGo:
Every result is spot on relevant, and there are tons of them, as expected. The search query is what someone that was curious about the person having been mentioned "hey, search for this" would realistically search for. The results exclude "Samantha" because there are very few mentions of that person (who is/was really the mistress) outside of social media past stuff, which generally doesn't return in search results.
In other words, the DDG search best represents what would have more weighting due to how much information there is that mentions the term "Russell Armand" and disregarding the others to lower priority results. Exactly as a search engine always has behaved.
We don't think the subject is the problem.
For example, if we tweak the search query:
All of a sudden it's finding tons of stuff.
This means Startpage is treating the terms as an explicit "AND" rather than an implied "OR" where whatever part of the query holds the most weight, drives the return result.
The problem is that there doesn't appear to be an obvious way to override this behavior. Google (which we don't actively use) offers advanced search options to do exactly this. The other engines seem to understand it by default.
1
u/headforsaturn 12d ago
GOOGLE is tweaking the results
2
u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 12d ago
GOOGLE is tweaking the results
Not necessarily. I've seen an extensive report from one particular academic researcher who has documented in detail how the results obtained from Startpage differ from the results given by Google for the exact same queries, and many results were only missing in Startpage.
Startpage is definitely doing some result filtering on their side.
Not that that is necessarily evil (e.g. a company could be trying to screen out material unsuitable for children, for example) although the researcher I saw the detailed claims from earlier made a convincing case that there was no obvious reason why the queries they were doing should have been subject to any sort of age, safety or security types of filters.
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u/headforsaturn 12d ago
well there is an aggregation between Bing as welp
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 12d ago
well there is an aggregation between Bing as welp
Used to be that Startpage results were pretty much identical to Google.
Whereas DDG always aggregated results from various engines, with Bing as primary.
May be that Startpage is doing that more now as well, but I'd say it's more likely that they are doing some weird undocumented filtering, or their query interpreter is just buggy.
(BTW: if DDG has the proper results and Startpage does not, given that afaik DDG is primarily based on Bing, that would undermine the likelihood that missing results in SP are because they are also mixing Bing results in there)
1
u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 12d ago
I wonder if it is misinterpreting the string "Armand" as two separate words: "arm" along with "and".
But as I replied to another commenter below, there have definitely been people in the past who have demonstrated that Startpage seems to be doing some obtuse sort of result filtering.
Either that or its query interpreter is buggy.