Startpage and Ecosia, two search engines that should make you forget about Google and Bing

Startpage and Ecosia

I know. Google owns the best search engine and that is why 90% of users search it. And no, although it is not my first article recommending alternatives, such as the one by DuckDuckGo, this is not a crusade against them. In the post about the duck finder, although it is also supposed to be more private, my recommendation was more focused on the use of their! Bangs. And what I am going to recommend you today are two alternative search engines, each one with its benefits and without sacrificing anything in terms of results. Those seekers are Startpage and Ecosia.

I am once again aware that many of you will already be thinking something bad, and I come to understand it. But why do we use Google or Bing? In the case of the first, because it is the one that offers us the best results. In the case of the second, because it is integrated into some services (such as Siri on iOS) or because you want to avoid searching Google without obtaining much less precise results. So, if we are interested in the search results, I think that the two alternatives that I am going to talk about are better options.

Startpage: Google, but private

The first is Startpage, which you can access from this link. In a transparency exercise, they explain to us how they work, in theory:

  • They use the Google search engine, so the results are pretty much the same. If we do the test, we can see that the videos may appear different and in a different order, but the results do not vary much. If there are variations, it is partly due to sponsored articles, as we will explain later.
  • They promise not to save, use or sell our data.
  • They do not use trackers or cookies, beyond one that is to save the settings that we configure.
  • Search results without profiling.
  • Anonymous view: this is an option that allows us to enter a website anonymously, so it is not necessary to activate incognito mode. The text "Anonymous view" appears to the right of the title of each article.

If we use the Anonymous view From Startpage, we will be browsing using your proxy, so the web pages will see your information, and not ours. Thus, they will not be able to see our IP or information about our equipment, they will not be able to create a robot portrait from our search preferences and social network trackers will not know what we visit. On the other hand, we will not be able to log in to any service and the cookies and other notices will always appear, since we will not have accepted them.

Startpage is not an NGO, but a company that has to generate income. These get them with your agreement with Google (Adwords) and the sponsored links that we mentioned above, but they will always be general ads and not based on our preferences.

Therefore and summarizing, if you care about privacy but want Google results, your best option is Startpage (or DuckDuckGo, but for what we will explain later).

Ecosia

In the same way that Startpage is an interesting alternative because it offers the same results as Google and respects our privacy, Ecosia is a good alternative, but in this case if you are a Microsoft Bing user. And it is that, simply, Ecosia is a search engine that uses the Bing engine to offer results, so its use will be almost exact. The main difference is no longer for ourselves, but for the environment. Available from this link, Ecosia searches will make you earn money, as when we use any other search engine, but the difference is that, in this case, profits will be donated to plant trees. Their goal is to plant one million trees by 2025, for which they donate 80% of their profits to non-profit organizations specialized in this.

If we pay attention to the information offered by the tree icon that appears on the top right, We will "plant" a tree when we do an average of 45 searches. So if you care about the environment, at least once in a while you should do a search on Ecosia.

! sp and! echo on DuckDuckGo

I may seem heavy mentioning DuckDuckGo two days in a row, but I do it for a reason: their! bangs. And, if we configure DuckDuckGo by default, we can search Startpage and Ecosia from the URL bar, simply by adding the shortcuts! Sp (StartPage) and! Eco (ECOsia) in front of each search. Whatever you do, I think that if what you care about is the results, you should at least take the test.


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  1.   adeplus said

    StartPage no longer seems such a different search engine from Google

    https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/

  2.   redsi said

    Yes, you are very heavy with duckduckgo, learning and memorizing a lot of codes so that you can search here or there, it is absurd, what do you want to do and do you like it? Well, ok, good for you, about color tastes, but In Google you get the same and more without those hassles, without privacy ok, but if you trust that duckduckgo offers privacy, just because they say so and that is good for you, because you can't prove it, well ok, good for you. Now, in this article you have hit on one thing and that is to say: if you do not care about search results, then this or that search engine may be better for you. Ok, I'll buy that for you. You know what happens, that all this that you expose here and many others, at least I, I have already tried them conscientiously and I always end up going back to Google, because even if they tell you that they use the same engine as Google, the results are not the same , in Google, they are always better, more precise and more concise, because that is what sacrificing privacy serves, in all my browsers I search in Google, but always logged in, because they are not the same results in Google, doing searches, being logged in than without logging in, that's what the exhaustive Google tracking is for, apart of course from to sell your data and earn money with them, to be a search engine of the ostia, most of the time, after years searching in Google, always logged in, when doing a search, I start to write and with the first, without the first letter of what I am looking for, it already suggests to me with an astonishing accuracy what I am looking for, just as you hear it, but for that you have to give a damn about privacy like me sar Google for years, always being logged in and in that way, creates and compiles a history about you, super super effective and unmatched by any other search engine. Now if you want privacy and you do not care about the accuracy or effectiveness of the results, then use another search engine, but of course, do not forget after you are losing your ass using another search engine for privacy and then you go running to use all your networks social, which have a privacy that is the most hears.

  3.   Ariel said

    In addition to the restoreprivacy website already cited here, I recommend this one as reference material for privacy issues and recommendations:
    https://www.privacytools.io/
    Here is the section on search engines:
    https://www.privacytools.io/providers/search-engines/
    Personally, I use startpage and searx along with some of their variants, especially those that are based in countries with better privacy laws.
    Regarding the search results, I am not interested in breaking my head discussing whether Google is better or not, so far everything I needed to search I found using the services I just mentioned, the rest is a purely academic debate.