StartPage

Startpage is almost perfect! It's just as advertised—all the quality search results of Google and none of the invasive tracking. My one quibble as that, personally, I find the format for image search results rather unpleasant, and this is a central feature. However, given all its other advantages, I'm willing to trade infinite image scroll and easy viewing for privacy.

When doing an extensive search, I always get blocked with this message; We apologize for the inconvenience: to prevent possible abuse of our service, your ability to connect to Startpage has been suspended at this time.

This happens when a large number of search requests are received from a particular internet connection during a short period of time. Screen scraping software may trigger this, as would a connection shared by many people at the same time, for example a VPN server or through Tor. Often, this can be resolved by connecting through a different server through your VPN provider or by connecting through a different Tor exit node.

It sucks.

StartPage banned me from their search engine due to "unusual traffic similar to bots". They also mentioned use of a VPN & Tor privacy browser as contributing factors - and I was using both. It seems strange that they call themselves a privacy browser, and yet they disallow privacy tools that might hide personal data from THEM. If Startpage doesn't collect and sell data as they claim, how are they paying salaries & bills? Does Startpage offer proof of their altruistic claims? Do they have verification from the privacy police? After they banned me, I deleted Startpage from all my browsers and replaced it with DuckDuckGo.

I did a search on stimulus checks and numerous sites with baseless claims about election fraud came up. WTF?!?! I've never experienced this from ANY search engine.
If they do this, how can they be trusted?

I agree with other reviewers that the search results yielded by Startpage are vastly inferior to other search engines. Misplaced a letter from your query? Sorry, no results found! Looking for exact phrases? Startpage is more likely to fail than other search engines, or return blatantly incorrect results, and actually relevant results either don't show up or are further down the search results, often in 3rd and 4th pages. Sometimes, I get some sort of IP blocks for no reason while browsing, and I have to reset my router for it to work again.

Was happy using startpage and startmail and mail up until now. Came home and tried to use startpage and got a message a message saying due to a high degree of usage from my ip address they are not letting me use startpage because I may be a bot.This after I reinstalled windows and the cloud decided to upload my photos and videos. That's all I took for them to get their panties in a Knott.
Anyway if you use startpage watch you usage or they won't like it.
I think I'm done with them.

I love how a search engine can help us with our privacy, reducing the chances of spreading our data and information online. Hopefully more people will start using Startpage.
Thanks!