No, in case you wonder, we haven't changed our minds.
Kudos for doing such an amazing job.
I wish we were to have a truly independent search engine, free and with no AI nonsense.
We can't have a web in our terms when the big search engines are getting us less and less genuine results each day, even these are buried by AI nonsense, and are soon to be scrapped.
AFAIK, Startpage results are taken from Google's engine, so it is not really independent.
Now that Google is ditching search results, I wonder what is Startpage going to do. Probably the same.
My early understanding was also Google, but that my IP is not revealed to them. Not sure what engine they use now, I could not find out via the Privacy link at the bottom of their home page. Using their "Anonymous View" link in search results is supposed to be fully private.
Anyway, by using Firefox, Startpage, uBlock Origin, Privacy badger, and the included Startpage Privacy Protection, I very, very rarely see any ads.
The "About" link in the home page hamburger also has good info.
Startpage has always acted as a sort of a proxy to Google. That gives us more privacy (but beware of what you put on your search terms) and no ads, which is nice; but the quality of results of Google Search is lowering each day; and they are going to stop showing them anymore soon; so Startpage is very likely going to be left in the cold. You may have issues with US government control of the search results bias.
From their privacy policy:
"When you search, your query is automatically stripped of unnecessary metadata including your IP address and other identifying information. We send the anonymized search query to our search and content providers and return the search results to you. We don’t log your searches."
So I might assume they use more than one search engine. I do like their no-log policy. Considering the current US political environment, privacy is essential.
Duckduckgo results, according to Wikipedia, come from a diversity of sources, including Google and Bing, so they are not really independent, and as Google is removing real search results, with Bing very likely doing the same, they may be doing the same soon.
They made recently a poll about AI, with 90% of people refusing it; their answer was creating the noai version. That reveals a strong pro-ai bias, since the right thing would have been refusing to use AI at all, or creating a ai.duckduckgo.com and leaving the main domain AI free.
@jgg
For a private search enginge try startpage dot com
Anonymous mode and AI optional.