DuckDuckGo seems to be the go-to replacement for Google for those concerned about privacy. DDG is relatively mainstream now, after being added as a search engine option in Safari back in 2014.
I’ve used DDG as my default search engine for a while now, but sometimes the results just aren’t great. I have been falling back to Google with this bookmarklet that takes advantage of DDG’s awesome !g bang feature.
(I should mention that sometimes the DDG results are actually better than Google’s. It depends on the query.)
Yesterday, I ran across Startpage.com for the first time. It’s a DDG-esque search engine that displays results from Google but claims to not track any user data. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of them before – they’ve been around since 1998.
It turns out you can swap !g with !sp with DDG’s bang feature to try searching Startpage.com instead of Google. I’ve switched my search fallback bookmarklet accordingly in the hope that SP really is a drop-in replacement for my use of Google.
I wm curious if anyone knows more about Startpage.com, or has experience using it. Please get in touch if you do.
