Their privacy policy and data flow have been the same since the buyout, they were transparent about any implications and the mitigations put in place to protect users, so I’m alright with it. The biggest problem I have with them is sometimes getting rate-limited because of a VPN or Tor, but that’s it. Alternatives like DDG and Brave Search are usually bad for results in my native language, so I’ve been using Startpage for a couple years now and it’s nice
I think they mostly handled it well, and ultimately the situation was resolved, but I still think they should have been a lot more up front about what they were doing.
Personally, I found people to be overreacting and DuckDuckGo‘s actions reasonable and transparent. Here’s the story:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
I’ve used Startpage until they got bought by an ad company. Haven’t looked into it since then:
https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company
Their privacy policy and data flow have been the same since the buyout, they were transparent about any implications and the mitigations put in place to protect users, so I’m alright with it. The biggest problem I have with them is sometimes getting rate-limited because of a VPN or Tor, but that’s it. Alternatives like DDG and Brave Search are usually bad for results in my native language, so I’ve been using Startpage for a couple years now and it’s nice
For me Brave search has pretty good results. Not as Google, of course, but enough. Definetly better than DDG.
I think they mostly handled it well, and ultimately the situation was resolved, but I still think they should have been a lot more up front about what they were doing.