Five Startpage Tips to improve your search experience
The private search engine Startpage is my search engine of choice. If you are a long-time reader, you know that I made the switch from using Google first to DuckDuckGo, and then to Startpage, back when news about Prism and other government surveillance and privacy-invading activities hit the world.
Startpage works considerably well out of the box. Open the site, enter your search query, and browse the results. It features web, image, and video searches, and ships with a couple of extras that make the experience even better.
I mentioned the Startpage proxy in 2014 already that enables you to load results anonymously, and posted a list of ten tips to improve Startpage search back in 2014 as well.
This guide will focus on tips that are new and have not been mentioned yet.
Startpage Tips
The following tips let you customize your Startpage search experience. All options are accessible on the preferences page.
Only connect to servers
Startpage will connect you to the closest (of their) servers when you connect to the site and run searches on it. This ensures quick response times.
You can change that default option in the settings. Basically, what it allows you to do is set a server that you want to be connected to.
So, if you don't want your search queries to be processed by a server in the US for instance, you could set this option to EU or Asian servers instead to avoid that.
The four options provided are a) closest, b) EU servers, c) US servers, or d) Asian servers.
Homepage Search Mode
If you happen to use the advanced search interface regularly, or maybe even exclusively, then you may find this option useful.
It allows you to switch from the basic search interface to the advanced search interface by default. So, whenever you open Startpage, the advanced search interface is loaded directly.
Homepage Theme
Startpage supports several themes that you can switch between. The default theme is called Air, and it is a light theme. You can switch to night for a darker theme, or white or black, which are like Air and Night, but without the background image for the most part.
Last but not least, you may also switch to classic themes if you prefer those. The classic themes change link placements on the Startpage homepage though, so keep that in mind.
The main use here is for users who prefer a dark theme instead of a light one, and for users who prefer a basic design when it comes to search (by removing the background images).
Search Suggestions
Startpage displays no search suggestions by default. You can enable those in the preferences. Startpage's suggestions system is different from many others as it puts privacy first and foremost.
The search engine displays general suggestions and won't display user queries as suggestions. Startpage shows "generally relevant suggestions" for queries only. Suggestions honor family filter settings.
Switch the "search suggestions" option in the Startpage preferences to "on" to enable suggestions.
Automatic highlighting
This is another interesting option. It highlights the search term on the web page that you open when you click on results.
But that is not the only thing that happens. Startpage opens the result using its proxy as well. If you enable the option, all results are automatically loaded using the proxy.
So, if you always want to use the proxy, this is one option to automate this.
Now You: Which search engine do you use primarily?
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.