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Startpage is a trojan horse. They pretend to care about your privacy. They don't. If you use an anonymizing proxy, they block you from searching. They are big tech creeps in disguise. Use DuckDuckGo instead.
Users who use anonymizing proxies receive the following error message when trying to use Startpage, a supposedly "private" search engine:
We apologize for the inconvenience: to prevent possible abuse of the Startpage.com service, your Internet connection has been prevented from accessing it at this time.
This happens when a large number of search requests are received from one's Internet connection in a short amount of time -- for example, if you are using "screen-scraping" software, or if you are sharing a connection with many people, perhaps through a proxy service.
Otherwise, if you have received this message in error, please help us in investigation by providing following information:
- Are you using TOR or other anonymous proxies?
- Do you have special browser configuration or extensions?
- Are you using VPN?
- Are you using a company network?
We will seek to refine and correct this whenever possible. Thank you for your patience.
Daniel L.'s review of StartPage earned 13 Very Helpful votes
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Hi Daniel - thanks for providing this feedback. Hopefully over time we can earn your trust back - especially given the lengths we go to for protecting your privacy. As an example, when you visit Startpage, your IP address is changed in their system to 0. 0. 0. 0 while many other private search engines (including DDG and Ecosia) only mask part of your IP.
We applaud our users who increase their privacy by using a VPN and many tell us that they do.
Around the time that you left this review, we had a large jump in abusers using specific VPNs and you were likely connected to a VPN server that was used for abusive purposes. Most of the time, if our users switch to a different server (within VPN provider server options) the situation resolves.
We've been focusing on resolving these issues and hope that you'll give us another try. Additionally, we've recently added many new features like news, shopping, currency conversion, calculator...
If you continue to have issues and would like personal attention to troubleshoot, we'd be happy to help. Feel free to contact us at support@startpage.com.