Ixquick merges with StartPage search engine
Heads up Ixquick users, the company behind the popular search engine announced today that it will merge the search engine with the company's other big search engine, StartPage.
What it means, basically, is that Ixquick will serve the same search results that StartPage provides.
According to the announcement on the official website, this is done in light of changing market conditions, and to combine the two products into one that is more powerful.
A quick of the Alexa ranking of both search engines reveals that StartPage is more popular than Ixquick, as it ranks among the top 4000 sites while ixquick made it barely in the top 10000 sites listing.
The main difference between StartPage and the current version of Ixquick is that the former is powered exclusively by Google search results while the latter aggregates data from multiple search engines to rank them based on factors such as prominence and quantity.
Both search engines are privacy orientated, and the merging won't change the fact. IP addresses are not recorded for instance, and data is not shared with third-parties.
The date for the merging is March 26, 2016. It is unclear right now however whether Ixquick will remain accessible under its current address, or if it will be redirected to StartPage instead.
Starting March 26, you'll receive private StartPage search results on Ixquick.com. We're merging our two search engines so we can focus on fighting Big Brother, rather than maintaining two different brands.
Ixquick has been serving terrific search results since 1999, but when we introduced StartPage in 2009, it quickly grew to become our most popular search engine. In light of changing market conditions, it made sense to combine the two products into a more potent force for good.
StartPage gives you actual Google search results with the full privacy guarantees of Ixquick. Google never sees you – and, of course, neither do we.
What's interesting is that Ixquick's search capabilities will leave on a ixquick.eu which means that current users of the service can use it instead of the .com address to continue using it.
All that is required for that is a change of bookmarks or search providers to use the new address instead of the old one.
Closing Words
Ixquick users who prefer the search engine over StartPage can keep using it, albeit under a new address. It is likely however that a large part of the search engine's user base will migrate over to StartPage.
The move should give StartPage another boost which should be noticeable not only in the site's Alexa ranking but also traffic and word of mouth on the Internet.
Now You: Which search engine do you prefer currently?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.