Startpage - Private Search Engine. No Tracking. No Search History | Opinion

Search and browse the internet without being tracked or targeted. Startpage is the world's most private search engine. Use Startpage to protect your personal data.

Source: https://www.startpage.com/

My RSS feeds were hot last night. Several stories covered how Google is changing its search engine's "look and feel" to make more room in the search bar for extended questions, not just keywords. 

This is the age of AI, and Google is embracing it big time.

I think that's fine. I use AI a lot and find it helpful, as long as we keep in mind that it still hallucinates to the extend that even after a "fact check" it can be wrong. At least, that is what I have found with Gemini. It's almost as if Gemini's developers are so eager to update its functions that they are compromising accuracy for the sake of rapidly implementing enhanced features.

Gemini feels like a drunken sailor at times. I trust it much less than I did in the past. I imagine this will improve as things settle down. But for now, it makes sense to at least try a search engine that contains no AI whatsoever. Startpage pays Google to get Google results but acts as a middleman, stripping away many identifiers from your search request. So it's as private a search as we can get. At least, that's what they say.

Because Startpage strips away identifying info, a search for say, "Earthpages" will give a more unbiased result. This can be useful if I am trying to figure out how well my blog is doing around the world. When I search at Google, the search engine knows my location and preferences and, in a sense, "strokes me up" by giving me what it thinks I want to see.

Sigh. AI is here to say. And that's probably a good thing. But it's nice to remember what the web was like not too long ago. For that, we can try Startpage.