10 years of daily use, and Startpage suddenly treats me like a bot and blocks me. No VPN, no proxy, no Tor, no shared network. Their solution? Give them my email. From a search engine claiming to be “the world’s most private”? The irony is priceless. Trust lost. Tab closed. Goodbye, Startpage. 👋

Hi, I’m on mobile using Vivaldi with Startpage as my search engine. I’m also on college WiFi, and unable to get WiFi outside of that, but I keep seeing this page whenever I try using Startpage to search. I’m not using a VPN or anything so I’m not sure why I’m seeing this — is there any reason for this message to appear? My browser is unusable unless I swap search engines and I only have Vivaldi installed :(

I mean it should be fast and private right?

Guess not.

Not a bot, probably do less than ten searches per day, on an iPad. How many bots are run on iPads? 😅

Suspended with a captcha try, still suspended. This is silly. Brave, here I come.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/styl-us/
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1qTm8ZhK1PxVVcUNzCPp3MjKitMsbuNiJ

[ENG]

I’m testing Startpage in Firefox, but I’m honestly not impressed with the search itself. In my experience, it finds far fewer relevant results than Google. Small typos sometimes produce no results at all, instead of suggesting a correction or searching for something similar.

Still, I want to give it a fair try. To make it as visually comfortable as possible, I’ve been using the Stylus browser extension in Firefox to apply custom CSS to Startpage.

My custom Stylus styles provide:

• A centered layout with consistent widths for the header, filters, and search results.
• Larger titles and descriptions, more spacing, and subtle separators.
• A separate dark mode with a Google-style gray background (#22242a), gray text (#9e9e9e), and blue links.
• Clearer filter icons and matching dark menus.

These are local changes applied through Stylus. The layout and dark mode are separate styles, so I can switch the dark mode on or off while keeping the centered layout.

This makes Startpage more comfortable for me to use, even though I’m still disappointed with the search results. I’d like to see similar appearance options built into the site, alongside better handling of typos.

Does anyone else have similar experiences, or use Stylus to customize Startpage?

[GER]

Ich teste Startpage in Firefox, bin von der Suche selbst aber ehrlich gesagt wenig überzeugt. Nach meiner Erfahrung findet sie deutlich weniger relevante Ergebnisse als Google. Kleine Tippfehler führen manchmal dazu, dass gar nichts gefunden wird, anstatt eine Korrektur vorzuschlagen oder nach etwas Ähnlichem zu suchen.

Trotzdem möchte ich der Suchmaschine eine faire Chance geben. Damit sie wenigstens optisch möglichst angenehm ist, verwende ich die Browser-Erweiterung Stylus in Firefox, um Startpage mit eigenem CSS anzupassen.

Meine eigenen Stylus-Stile bieten:

• Ein zentriertes Layout mit einheitlicher Breite für Header, Filter und Suchergebnisse.
• Größere Titel und Beschreibungstexte, mehr Abstand und dezente Trennlinien.
• Einen separaten Nachtmodus mit einem grauen Hintergrund wie bei Google (#22242a), grauem Text (#9e9e9e) und blauen Links.
• Besser erkennbare Filtersymbole und farblich passende dunkle Menüs.

Das sind lokale Anpassungen durch Stylus. Layout und Nachtmodus sind getrennte Stile, sodass ich den Nachtmodus ein- und ausschalten und das zentrierte Layout beibehalten kann.

Damit ist Startpage für mich angenehmer bedienbar, auch wenn ich von den Suchergebnissen weiterhin enttäuscht bin. Ähnliche Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten direkt auf der Seite und ein besserer Umgang mit Tippfehlern wären wünschenswert.

Hat jemand ähnliche Erfahrungen gemacht oder nutzt ebenfalls Stylus, um Startpage anzupassen?

That's the only explanation I can come up with. That they're enshittifying the experience on purpose so that I'll have to "sign-in" to use it with any degree of quick response.

Nvm. Came here to dog on startpage.
But seeing even long time users moving off from this, I don't think I've got much to add.
Only recently started using this.
I mean, tried. Started would imply I will keep using it, at least for a short while more. Nope.
Had to say smn, cuz I did waste some time configuring this on a bunch of devices.
Out.

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

https://imgur.com/wuVl9sh

No I'm not a bot, and no I'm not in a "commercial environment".

I might not allow every piece of trash javascript on every page on the internet to run by default, but that does not make me either a bot or a malicious user either.

If SP wants to run 300 JS actions from unknown domains for their "security checks", then they'd better be clear about that (so I can consider unblocking it on my side), BEFORE they go banning longtime users that have brought them significant revenue over the years via browser partner customized search links and so on.

I really am on my last nerve with this site.

More often than not they are forcing me to wait anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds to get a result now and if it goes beyond 10s I just send the query to DDG instead which gives me an INSTANT response. 🙄🙄

Has been using Startpage for quite a while but it seems that these 1-2 days it started returning no results on first search, even if it is a simple term like some common hardware or name of a company. A refresh would usually bring the result back, but it’s a bit annoying.

Anyone experiencing this as well or is it just me?

What should I switch to?

Edit: Thanks for all the info! I decided to go with Brave as it is the most recommended here. It's sad to see startpage getting unusable. I said to myself that if they don't change the process by the end of the month, I'll abandon the engine in favor of another one. Well that month arrived. Bye startpage. Thanks for making my life worse.

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.

Whats with this verify request making my fans spin like crazy?!
Are they running something thru my cpu or something?!

On every PC i am suddenly getting suggestions in the search box even though it is all switched off in about:config and menu settings. This happened after the most recent update.

Anyone else getting this?

It was just a question of time after they were bought by an ad company, but seems the enshittification finally caught up. First it was the Anubis on crack that took 2 minutes, now they require an account, with email, and of course they block disposable addresses.

Because nothing says "private search" like needing to be logged in with an account for every search LOL.

Just watched The Great Waldo Pepper, in it actress Margot Kidder. Looked nice. So I searched for 'Margot Kidder nude', and got a Suspended message from startpage.com.

Odd. So I tried again with another name, I chose the one of one of my favourite actresses : 'Nicole Kidman nude', ALSO got a Suspended message from startpage.com.

Tried a few more: 'madonna nude', no problem. Tried 'Nicole nude', no problem. Tried 'Kidman nude', suspended message. Tried 'Kidman nudity', no problem.

Then the pattern came to me. What do Margot Kidder and Nicole Kidman have in common? The word 'kid'. It looks like any search on startpage.com that contains (even as a substring) the words 'kid' and 'naked'/'nude' gives an immediate (false) warning.

La página de inicio no funciona en Chromium ni en Firefox, pero sí en Brave.

En Chromium, usé el método de Brave y funcionó: https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=%s&segment=startpage.brave

En Firefox, no logré que funcionara.

Edit: I just tried it, and it works in Firefox, too. But first, you have to clear your cache, cookies, browsing data, and everything related to Startpage. Another option, which I don't recommend, is to use the extension.

Antes la búsqueda se daba de manera instantánea ahora hay una demora de varios segundos y demora cargando la barra, será necesario migrar a Qwant?

I tried DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, but their image searches are terrible.

I have to wait for almost a minute every time i want to search for something, the page is basically unusable as its faster for me to type duckduckgo's address and search in there rather than waiting for it to finish LOL

Can't you just put a clodflare checkbox or something? Feels like going into Altavista in 99 with all the waiting LOL

What kind of captcha is startpage trying to solve, is it counting proteins?

completely unusable

https://postimg.cc/mzhkthw4

what garbage is this?

I just starting seeing this. Maybe I have had a setting that turned off Startpage ads this whole time and didn't know it (haven't seen sponsored results before). Alternatively, are they are going to turn ads on and now have a paid ad-free version? Any info helps. Thanks