Startpage presents itself as a search tool that guards user privacy, drawing its results from platforms like Google and Bing, yet with notable caveats:
We forward your query to our partner search engines on your behalf. They never obtain your personal information.
You receive results that aren’t tailored by your personal history…. We don’t retain your searches. We don’t build profiles. Once a search concludes, the data is erased.
The service reportedly attracts over two million visits daily; my friend Adam Holland uses it regularly, and through him I became aware that some Startpage searches return incomplete results.
Consider one instance, the complete Startpage query for solvera “chris dinota” (I left the trailing whitespace intact to illustrate that only those two results were returned); I chose this particular query because it closely mirrors the one Adam ran:
And here is a Google search for solvera “chris dinota” (conducted in a private window to lessen any influence from prior context on the results):
As the images illustrate, Google retrieves a substantially greater number of sources than Startpage, including a Washington Post document (which accompanied a post I published on the topic), an item in the Dallas Morning News, and a Reason-hosted copy of my Washington Post piece on the subject. Bing returns a comparable spread of results.
Here is a Startpage query for “pro se prisoner sought to file a belated”, a phrase that appears in one of my blog entries:
And here is Google’s search for the same phrase (ignore the AI overview; focus on the single result at the bottom):
I’ve come across several additional instances as well.
When I contacted Startpage about this issue via email, I received the following reply:
Thank you for getting in touch, and for the detailed examples.
Startpage collaborates with multiple search providers, including Google, to redistribute results. Startpage does not alter the outcomes that are delivered; they come straight from our providers.
But that explanation does not account for the missing sources in many cases; and when I pressed for more information, I did not receive further clarification. It seems that they submit their background search engine queries in an unusual manner, or perhaps there is some irregular filtering at play.
I even wondered whether queries might originate from Dutch servers, given that Startpage is a Dutch company and Google could be filtering material under European regulations. Yet when I connected via a VPN to a Dutch host and ran the Google query, the results resembled a typical U.S.-based Google search and differed markedly from Startpage’s results.
In any case, one clear takeaway is that using Startpage can, at times, omit a substantial portion of credible results that Google and Bing would surface. I’m curious about the underlying cause, but regardless of the reason, anyone using Startpage should recognize that this omission can occur.
