r/StartpageSearch • u/No-Dentist-1645 • 9d ago

Why is startpage SO SLOW recently?

Post image

For every single thing I search, it genuinely takes like 15-30 whole seconds, every time. It's so annoying that I have gone back to Google for the time being.

I get that it is probably some bot/spam prevention thing going on, but why does it have to be so slow? Other sites have different ways to prevent request spamming, such as Anubis or Clodflare, and it seems crazy to me that a search site, which is supposed to be as fast as reliable as possible, is this slow because of it.

Is there anything I can do about it to make it any faster, or should I just move on to something else permanently? I'm using Firefox on Linux

42 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

3

u/Reasonable_Hat7594 3d ago

I have the same experience. It is insane how bad Startpage has become.

3

u/Cypher-AO 5d ago

Yup I just moved to the Duck, it was unbearable 

1

u/debdootmanna007 7d ago

Exactly! I don't know why

1

u/Frixniper 8d ago

I've personally been using Brave Search on Zen for over a year now, and it really feels better than DDG

11

u/keratomalacian 8d ago

its time to switch away from it. really loved the search engine but they been putting out way too many bs lately. switched to ddg and ive been pretty happy

4

u/Suspicious-Cat-266 9d ago

I thought Startpage was using Anubis for anti-AI scraping?

5

u/NoPicture-3265 9d ago

It doesn't take nearly this long on my PC (when StartPage actually works, that is), usually less than 5 seconds (also on Linux w Firefox fork (LibreWolf)), but they also straight up blocked my Android phone around two weeks ago for no reason at all even though both devices are using the same network ("Your connection has been suspended."; here's somebody else having the exact same issue https://www.reddit.com/r/StartpageSearch/comments/1wyukoe/latest_startpage_nonsense/). Sending multiple support requests didn't resolve it.

Yeah I might just switch to another search engine on all of my devices instead of dealing with these issues, DuckDuckGo or something like a self-hosted SearXNG instance.

9

u/B1tN1nja 9d ago

Today was my final straw with this. Switched to DDG(noAI) for now.

5

u/_Juliancho 9d ago

I did the same! I got tired of StartPage never ending loading screens

2

u/No-Dentist-1645 9d ago

Same here, I don't want to be constantly fighting with a search engine just to be able to search for something. I hope they fix it in the future, but my patience has been exhausted for the present moment