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Startpage.com: Privacy-oriented search engine
- dgut 6y agoShameless plug,.. I run Okeano [1], a privacy friendly [2] search engine that aims to use 80% of profits to purchase river interceptors from the Ocean Cleanup Project and deploy them to the worlds most polluting rivers. We support domain blocklist [3] natively and have !waves (similar to !bangs). We're bootstrapped and not owned by an advertising company (startpage.com is owned by System1). [1] https://okeano.com https://okeano.com [2] https://okeano.com/privacy https://okeano.com/privacy [3] https://okeano.com/blocklist https://okeano.com/blocklist
- jdemaeyer 6y agohttps://okeano.com/reports https://okeano.com/reports gives me > Can't find what you're looking for.
- dgut 6y agoYes, sorry. Have to fix that. We are not making money yet so no reports to show.
- jchook 6y agoCoincidentally I also see Ecosia[1] on HN front page right now, a search engine that plants trees. 1. https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/
- knuxus 6y agothat uses Facebook analytics, apparently
- hundchenkatze 6y agoIt's probably not the best idea to go against established conventions, but I think it'd be pretty cool if you used tilde instead of exclamation marks for waves. :)
- dgut 6y agoYes, I think this is a good idea. Might make this optional or as an alternative. Added to the pipeline.
- lasagna_coder 6y agoI like this. But without adblock I see no ads. Also would it be possible to have a subscription based no-ad version so we don't see ads + don't feel guilty that we aren't helping out by not clicking any ads? I guess it would be hard to stay private because it would mix an paid account id with search queries, but maybe there's a way.
- lasagna_coder 6y agoalso, dark mode pls
- dgut 6y agoIn the pipeline!
- dgut 6y agoWe aren't running ads.. yet. Need more users before we can make a contract where we aren't required by the ad company to send user data. Paid plan has been on my mind for a while now.. and as you said, it's complicated. It's in the pipeline.
- lasagna_coder 6y agoWould be a nice secondary business idea for some to create an ad company to cater to smaller online platforms like yours without requiring user data. Another complicated prospect but at least it would give you a starting point. There's also things like https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ who seem like they help support online content creators. I wonder if there's a way to treat search results like "content".
- chris_f 6y ago> "There's also things like https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ who seem like they help support online content creators. I wonder if there's a way to treat search results like "content". It is possible. I built the search engine [0] that was the first to integrate Coil as a monetization source. It is pretty small, but Coil payments do cover about 2% of the monthly cost to run the service. Infinity Search also uses Coil. [1] Here is an article with some thoughts around monetizing a privacy based search engine [2]. --------- [0] https://www.runnaroo.com/ https://www.runnaroo.com/ [1] https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ [2] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Monetization/5dXAW6NwF https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...
- rkudeshi 6y agoDo you index webpages yourself or piggyback off Bing/Google?
- dgut 6y agoIt uses Bing as a backup and for most general search. We have our own index that focuses on specific communities, including HN. Eventually you'll see more tailored search for that index, including a "privacy rank" and page size.
- forgotmypw77 6y agoplease test your site with nojs. js is not an option with many devices and useragents. thank you for doing what you do.
- dgut 6y agoIt's only 22 kb of JS and at least 2/3 of that is Axios which I'm about to replace with Fetch.. but I understand :) In the pipeline!
- Klonoar 6y agoI appreciate the UI work on Okeano, but could you please support a dark mode option?
- dgut 6y agoThank you. Yes, working on it.
- bwQAp2cjo 6y agoMade an account just to say this, search results are good, maybe better than DDG, cant say for sure. Made couple of searches and results are very relevant to what I am searching. And it's faster than DDG, at least for me. I like it.UI is nice too, clean AF. I don't care much for the ocean cleaning part to be honest, yes shame on me. I guess I am cynical since some companies push those altruistic stuff to advertise themselves. Don't mean no ill, it's great what you're doing. Considering using at as my main search engine. Do you proxy exact results from Bing or are the results managed before showing to user? Just searched 4chan, no direct link to 4chan in first page, only "about" it.
- dgut 6y agoHi. Thank you! I try to keep the UI clean and simple. It's nice to hear somebody appreciates that. Regarding results, I wrote an answer to that question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717814 That 4chan results page is embarrassing indeed. Currently many things in the pipeline, but will fix. If you find any quirks, my email is in my profile. - David
- bwQAp2cjo 6y agoThank you to you too! I think folks at r/privacy r/privacytoolsio would be interested in this, could bring some more users.
- ColinHayhurst 6y agoThey have a page with links to privacy policies https://www.privacytools.io/providers/search-engines/ https://www.privacytools.io/providers/search-engines/
- eecks 6y agoThe anonymous view feature is cool. A comparison with DDG would be nice.
- ignoramous 6y agoAs cool as it is, I usually find myself using https://archive.is https://archive.is as a browser. For a time, I used https://brow.sh https://brow.sh but its hosted html browser is not up anymore.
- godzillabrennus 6y agoThat must be a great experience... RMS has improved upon that if you are interested in privacy to that extent: https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/ https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
- ignoramous 6y agoIt is, especially for Medium and Substack posts, websites that my DNS resolver or ISP block, and for webpages that refuse to load with uMatrix in its default setting.
- ffpip 6y agouMatrix in default settings pretty much breaks every website. You definitely need to whitelist cloudflare CDN and other popular CDNs like Amazon S3, things like jquery.com ,and maybe Google for the recaptcha (unless you whitelist google for individual websites)
- astrea 6y agoHow do they make money?
- notadog 6y agoThey have ads.
- UShouldBWorking 6y agoSenator, we have ads.
- ignoramous 6y agoA caveat: I stopped using StartPage after it sold to an advertisement firm and switched to https://lite.duckduckgo.com/ https://lite.duckduckgo.com/ instead. The sale doesn't necessarily mean StartPage is any less private (because you can sell to an ethical advertising firm, why not) but something to keep in mind. Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...
- ehnto 6y agoCertainly food for thought. Unless startpage.com has revenue, and they leave it unchanged, I would have to be cynical and say that it's only a matter of time before the advertising shows up.
- NieDzejkob 6y agoI have had very good experience with Startpage. Unlike DDG, it's a Google proxy, so the search quality tradeoff is much less stark (not non-existent, as there's no personalization...)
- SimeVidas 6y agoIn what aspects is it more private than the duck?
- dgut 6y agoThe two noteworthy aspects are: 1) if you click on an ad on startpage, you're inside Google's network. If you click on an ad on the duck, you're inside Bing's network. 2) the duck is independent and startpage is owned by an advertising company.
- danarel 6y agoDDG is located in the US and logs partial IP information. Startpage is headquartered (and under legal jurisdiction) of The Netherlands. Also, it's a bit naive to call System1 just an advertising company. It's a bit larger of a company than that. Sadly, an ex-Startpage consultant did a lot work to confuse and manipulate users into not understanding their partnership.
- vimy 6y agoIs a decentralized search engine possible?
- tobias2014 6y agoYaCy is one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy
- ignoramous 6y agoThere are two that I know of: YaCy: https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server https://github.com/yacy/yacy_search_server (functional) Seeks: https://github.com/beniz/seeks https://github.com/beniz/seeks (defunct?) --- There's also SearX, which isn't distributed but is a metasearch engine (pulls results from multiple search engines) that you can self-host [0] or use one of its many mirrors [1]. [0] https://github.com/searx/searx https://github.com/searx/searx [1] https://searx.space/ https://searx.space/
- rasengan 6y agoPrivate.sh ( https://private.sh https://private.sh ) actually encrypts your search query and washes it thru a proxy prior to delivering it to the search engine entity which decrypts it, performs the search, and encrypts the results before sending it back through the same channel.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y agoHow is that encryption scheme any better than https?
- rasengan 6y agoRegardless of https, ddg or startpage see your IP address and search query and you'll have to trust they don't log it even passively. In this case, your query is encrypted on the client side, passed through a proxy, decrypted at the engine, search is performed, and then results are encrypted, passed through the proxy, and the client side decrypts and displays the results. USER Encrypted Search --- Proxy --- Search Engine Decrypts Search, Searches, Encrypts Search --- Proxy --- USER decrypts results and displays. The search engine does not know your IP, and Private.SH does not know what you searched for.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y agoOh, so the search provider is a separate entity. Interesting, looking forward to seeing their source code.
- pmoriarty 6y ago"Private.SH does not know what you searched for." but "your query is encrypted on the client side" and then "the client side decrypts and displays the results" So all this encryption/decryption code, where does it come from? If the answer is Private.SH, then Private.SH can in fact know what the user searched for and the results they got by feeding the user code that sends that information (or even just the encryption keys) back to Private.SH Also, I'm not clear on how the search engines are supposed to be able to decrypt something encrypted by the client. What actually happens there?
- a3n 6y agoddg has a bang code for startpage. !sp takes you to their home page. !sp privacy does that search on sp. !sp duck duck go does that search on sp. EDIT: Ahem ... !ddg !ddg recursion
- marban 6y agoRandom anecdote on the intangible value of "Privacy" for real-world users: I run a news website with the upsell argument of zero ads, tracking, or third-party cookies and have gained no significant increase in conversions from it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- onetimemanytime 6y agoso they say. Sorry. I use them to search for certain things but don't expect much in protection
- eth0up 6y agoStartpage had a strong beginning, eg ixquick. I think I first learned of it through Katherine Albrecht. It's now a pitiful mutant of its origins, which I miss. Options are waning, but I've been using MetaGer[1] with fair results. I wish scroogle was still up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoRe: Scroogle &c. - there are some Searx instances which manage to return Google results, e.g. https://searx.be https://searx.be - and this is what I've generally settled on. (Bing-backed searches, including DDG, don't end up working very well for me.)
- AniseAbyss 6y agoWhen Google had to cave in to copyright and made their image search shit on mobile I switched to startpage who doesn't care and let you download images- anonymously to boot.
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514805
- mrtweetyhack 6y agostartpage.com is malware, always has been
- turminal 6y agoIs it FOSS?
- mrkn1 6y agoFor privacy search engine I prefer DDG. For privacy social network Plumebio.