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Startpage is now owned by an advertising company.[Y] [Y] https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/startpage-and-privacy-one-group/ https://www.startpage.

by ProAm 7y ago

Startpage is now owned by an advertising company.[Y] [Y] https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/startpage-and-privacy-one-group/ https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/startpage-and...

danShumway 7y ago
Correct, but it's still preferable over Google. Startpage's parent company is (currently) less integrated with Startpage than Google's Advertising department is with Search. Their search results are also better formatted, and ads are more clearly marked. Startpage also doesn't do link wrapping if you turn off Javascript, which is such a huge privacy win over Google Search that I would still tell you to prefer Startpage even if I knew that they were slurping up other data. On the marketing side, Startpage's parent company also doesn't own the vast majority of the online ecosystem, and distributing power among multiple advertisers is better than consolidating all of the power behind a single company who also owns a dominant web browser. System1, for all of its faults, isn't actively proposing web standards with the goal of deprecating URLs. If you can't use DuckDuckGo, you should still prefer Startpage to Google. Google Search is also owned by an advertising company, one that openly mines literally every single data point of every single search they do. You can't get worse than that. I see people who are saying they want to break free of Google, but that they can't give up Google's results. I'm not going to tell them to stick with Google if an almost universally better alternative exists.
noizejoy 7y ago
I really wish discussions would better distinguish between tracking, advertising, and camouflaged advertising. I actually like advertising as one avenue of finding stuff. I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged. In practical terms: When I’m searching for guitars, I like seeing both: third party results and ads that are not camouflaged. I also like seeing guitar ads on a guitar related website. But I hate seeing guitar ads on an unrelated website, just because I looked at a guitar website a few days ago. And I hate when a guitar ad is camouflaged as an independent review. An advertising company that doesn’t track or camouflage gets my support. And I just hope that StartPage is and remains that kind of company.
- d1zzy 7y ago
  > I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged. AFAIK pretty much all customers that pay for internet advertising WANT tracking (a cookie or URL session ID that tracks you from the advertising platform to the advertised site destination) as a way to verify that their money is actually producing results, otherwise they have little way of knowing that.

by ProAm 7y ago

danShumway 7y ago

Correct, but it's still preferable over Google. Startpage's parent company is (currently) less integrated with Startpage than Google's Advertising department is with Search. Their search results are also better formatted, and ads are more clearly marked. Startpage also doesn't do link wrapping if you turn off Javascript, which is such a huge privacy win over Google Search that I would still tell you to prefer Startpage even if I knew that they were slurping up other data. On the marketing side, Startpage's parent company also doesn't own the vast majority of the online ecosystem, and distributing power among multiple advertisers is better than consolidating all of the power behind a single company who also owns a dominant web browser. System1, for all of its faults, isn't actively proposing web standards with the goal of deprecating URLs. If you can't use DuckDuckGo, you should still prefer Startpage to Google. Google Search is also owned by an advertising company, one that openly mines literally every single data point of every single search they do. You can't get worse than that. I see people who are saying they want to break free of Google, but that they can't give up Google's results. I'm not going to tell them to stick with Google if an almost universally better alternative exists.

noizejoy 7y ago

I really wish discussions would better distinguish between tracking, advertising, and camouflaged advertising. I actually like advertising as one avenue of finding stuff. I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged. In practical terms: When I’m searching for guitars, I like seeing both: third party results and ads that are not camouflaged. I also like seeing guitar ads on a guitar related website. But I hate seeing guitar ads on an unrelated website, just because I looked at a guitar website a few days ago. And I hate when a guitar ad is camouflaged as an independent review. An advertising company that doesn’t track or camouflage gets my support. And I just hope that StartPage is and remains that kind of company.

d1zzy 7y ago
> I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged. AFAIK pretty much all customers that pay for internet advertising WANT tracking (a cookie or URL session ID that tracks you from the advertising platform to the advertised site destination) as a way to verify that their money is actually producing results, otherwise they have little way of knowing that.