StartPage and Ixquick are working together to provide an alternative, private search option for Google. The two search engines have always been fairly closely intertwined but this is only going to get closer in the future. Ixquick is no longer going to marketed, and results will in future come from StartPage, which in turn gets them from Google. However, they have not given up on it entirely, because the European version Ixquick.eu is still available. The latter version will continue to provide results drawn from a combination of various different engines such as Yahoo and Yandex. It will also continue to use specialised search engines to deliver the best possible results. However, if you're not bothered by any of that, simply move across to using StartPage instead.
StartPage does not collect IP addresses, use tracking cookies, or collect any personal information. Since they are based in Europe, they offer the crucial protection of being outside U.S. jurisdiction, where they are not subject to the Patriot Act and other U.S. data collection mandates.
Results from the engines does differ. A search for 'fox red labrador' gives me the same results on StartPage and Ixquick (which given what they've just done doesn't surprise me), but in comparison to the .eu version only 2 results were the same, and differed markedly in their positions on the first page of results. In comparison with Google UK there were 3 common results, and with Google.com there were 4 common results.
In summary therefore we don't seem to be that much better off. We're swapping StartPage AND Ixquick for StartPage. Except that we've still got Ixquick as an .eu resource. The results that we get from StartPage and Ixquick are the same, but they differ to the Ixquick .eu version and they all differ to Google.uk and Google.com
So that's helpful isn't it.
Comments