Batu69 Posted October 25, 2016 Share Posted October 25, 2016 In 2013 I wrote a basic comparison between DuckDuckGo (DDG) and Startpage. That article has since been viewed several hundreds of thousands of times and I receive regular requests for updates. Has anything changed in the last 3 years? Is DDG the new king? Let’s find out. Last time I explained why Startpage was my search engine of choice. This time I’ll do a side by side comparison of both covering features and everything that matters when it comes to privacy and security. I use startpage.com in most of my examples but you can use ixquick.com as well. Everything mentioned in this article applies to ixquick.com as the two sites have merged earlier this year. There is also ixquick.eu (not covered in this article) which returns results from search engines that are not Google (Yahoo, Yandex, Statesman). I found no visible difference in use of ixquick.com or .eu so I won’t mention .eu in the rest of the article. Look and Feel – Homepage The vast majority of people I know, don’t use a search engine’s homepage to perform a search. Instead they use the browser’s address bar or designated search field. This doesn’t mean there are not a lot of people out there using search engines the classic way; open searchengineofchoice.com > type search. So the homepage can be important as a lot of people see and use it often. StartPage A clean and simple homepage. Rather than having additional links and information in a slide deck it’s readily available without making the page appear messy or crowded. To learn more about how StartPage works I can click the arrow at the bottom of the page which just extends the current page. When I’m done reading I just scroll up and enter my search. They make adding the search engine to your browser very easy too, it’s right there. “Add to Firefox” (or Safari, the URL and wording adjust depending on the browser you use to visit the page) shows a small information window with instructions and you’re done in just a few seconds. DuckDuckGo Also clean and simple and easy to see where to type to start a search. Easy to see where to start typing and get a search going. A small slide deck below the search field offers links to learn more about DDG, offers search ideas, offers a tour and a way to spread the word to your friends. While it certainly keeps things neat and clean, the slides take 23 seconds to cycle. I don’t know about you but on a webpage with just a search field, I type what I look for and am gone off that page in 2-3 seconds. This means I’ll never see any of the other info the slide deck has. The “learn More” link takes you away from the search page so when you’re done reading you have to navigate back to the homepage first. This one goes to StartPage. Look and Feel – The search Here there are really only two things that matter, for me anyway. Search suggestions as I’m typing and how fast it performs the search and loads my results. Search suggestions Both engines can do it. DDG does so by default but for StartPage you have to enable it in the settings. Speed DuckDuckGo loads results faster. Of course being served through Amazon AWS and getting help from Yahoo! helps a lot in this regard. When it comes to web results, the engines are matched. However on an image search StartPage is clearly slower. Slow enough to notice the difference but not too slow to be annoying. DuckDuckGo is superior here. Look and Feel – Search results, Web The page every user will see, regardless of which search method they use, is the results page. The search results must be accurate, relevant and easy to read. Loading more results or switching between “web”, “image” and “video” should also be easy to do. Finally no-one likes to scroll to get to what they’re looking for (though this of course depends on how clear the search term is) For this example I used the following search query: “Apple privacy policy”. StartPage After a pretty big block of ads, the page I was after is listed first. I didn’t have to scroll. The layout is standard what we’re used to from a search engine but the colors and font size choices make it look a bit messy and not as easy to read at a glance. The placement of the URL directly underneath the title is also not something I’m a big fan of. The search tools to select a time frame to search in are available on the left and don’t require additional clicking to get to. Where StartPage shines when it comes to privacy, is the proxy. They load the website for you and display it in a frame. As far as that website knows, you were never there. Any browsing you do on that site is routed through the proxy as well so your click away. It’s a great feature. DuckDuckGo My results are the first thing to show up and ads are pushed to the side (occasionally one ad would show at the top of the list, the rest would still be off to the side). This is the way it should be in my humble opinion. The page I was looking for is first in the list so no scrolling required. The layout is standard but the use of color (lack of), font, font size and favicon makes the way these results are displayed much easier to digest. Search tools are hidden behind the “Anytime” button rather than shown by default and a globe button allows you to narrow the search down to a specific region which can be very useful. In this case setting Brazil as the region showed me the URL to the Portuguese privacy policy just a few places down in the results list. Easy to read VS extra privacy features? I have to go with StartPage. If it wasn’t for the proxy though, DDG would have won this hands down. Look and Feel – Search results, Images I search for images A LOT so having a clear presentation and of course relevant results is very important. The ability to quickly pull up similar images is also a big deal for me. but unfortunately neither engines offer this feature. For the images test I used the search query: “White cat with green eyes”. DuckDuckGo That’s a lot of white kitties with green eyes. As expected, I got the results I wanted. Click on an image to see the dimensions and a link to the actual file. Basic filter options let me select a size of small, medium or large. Offering an image search is new since I wrote the last article. At that time DDG was unable to do this. StartPage Here as well, all the cats I expected to see. The layout is the same on both engines and while there are no filter options to select an image size, there are a few other really nice options. First, the option to visit the page the image is on, very useful if you want additional info on the image or the story that goes with it. Second, the option to visit the page anonymously, this is the same proxy feature mentioned earlier which loads the page in a frame. Last, that good ‘ol proxy to view just the image. Note: While the first results were mostly spot on, DuckDuckGo started mixing in other content much faster than StartPage. Meaning after scrolling just once on the DDG results I started seeing black cats with blue eyes, random color cats with yellow eyes etc. On the StartPage results this happened too but there were much more white cats with green eyes preceding it. For both the amount of accurate images it pulled up and the proxy options, StartPage takes this round. Look and Feel – Search results, Videos For this one I went back to the “Apple privacy policy” search. There are just wayyyy to many cat videos out there.. DuckDuckGo DDG pulls up relevant results and displays a privacy warning when clicking on a video. No filter options though. StartPage StartPage, same story. Relevant results and a privacy warning when clicking on a video. Unfortunately their proxy can not help here. A nice addition is the menu “Relevant” which can be changed to “Popular”, “Recent” or sort the results by playback time of “Short”, “Medium” or “long”. The engines are matched when it comes to video search but StartPage takes this one home just by offering some useful filter options. Browser integration In the 2013 article I mentioned one had to install additional software; Glims, to be able to add StartPage as a browser search engine. Luckily StartPage can easily be added to Firefox and Safari now. For Safari the site downloads an extension that takes over the built-in preset search engines and for Firefox it’s as easy as just clicking a button and changing a setting. Once added, it works as one would expect. Type a search into the address bar and Startpage will take over and show you the results. In Firefox you can use the address bar or the designated search field next to it, the results are the same. For DuckDuckGo, browser integration is a lot easier (which is likely why they don’t offer buttons for it on their homepage), Apple has chosen to offer DDG as a search engine option. No need to install an extension, just change the setting from Google to DuckDuckGo and Safari is all set. The same goes for Firefox which has it’s default set to Yahoo. Go to settings, pull down the list of options and DDG is right there. If StartPage can get these vendors to build their engine in as an option it would go a long way to getting them more users. Almost everyone I know has heard of DuckDuckGo but has never heard of StartPage. Built-in presence would likely change that. Again once StartPage has been manually added to your browser, it works like a charm. However just because of the easy change in settings and no additional clicking or downloading required, DuckDuckGo takes this round. Additional features DuckDuckGo • Bangs – Bangs are little codes you can add to your search to narrow your search to a specific website or service. For example a search for “!a shoes” searches for shoes on amazon.com. There are thousands of bangs you can use which can speed up your search a lot.• Adapting search tools – Depending on what you’re searching for, the default “web, Images, Videos” expands and offers more filters. Here are a few examples: A specific search shows the default filters. Search for an artist and additional filters show up showing useful and relevant info. Typing “forecast” not only shows web results but a weather pane showing all the relevant info. “Local theaters” pulls up Yelp suggestions. • Maps – Enter an address and a window-wide map is presented, powered by OpenStreetMap. You can zoom, pan around, make it fullscreen or open the displayed address in the Maps service of your choice including Apple Maps. It’s very slick and works great. • Customization – You can select several themes that play with colors, font, font sizes, page width, alignment etc. but the default settings are the best I believe. Overall DDG has much more granular customization which allows you to tweak everything and set it exactly how you want it. I did not see any obviously missing features when it came to customization, there is something for everyone. Click to see all available DDG settings. • Saving your settings – If you made changes to the settings, maybe a different theme and some font changes, you want to be able to save those tweaks so you don’t have to make them every time you use the site. DDG offers to save your settings to the cloud so you can easily load them on any device. You set a passphrase and it stores basic parameters. A quick test with several passphrase showed me how easy it is to load someone else’s data (and delete it). So if you put a lot of time and effort into customizing your DDG, make sure you set a passphrase no-one will easily guess because some clown can pull up your settings, change or delete them. Cloud save and the ability to pull up your settings on any device is a nice idea but the implementation needs work. StartPage • Proxy – The gem of StartPage is the proxy feature. I have mentioned it earlier but it’s worth repeating. Perform a search, then visit the desired page and browse it, all anonymously. It’s a feature that’s easily overlooked but worth exploring.• Maps – Pulling up a map in StartPage can be tricky. Sometimes it’s clever enough to figure out you’re looking for an address and will show a map. Most of the times though, even if you enter a complete address, you have to add the word “map” to the search before the map shows up. When the map does finally show, it’s a very small, static Google Maps image. You can zoom in and out but can’t pan around or do… anything else. I was told StartPage will be moving to OpenStreetMaps in the future but no date has been set for this transition.• Customization – The user has a choice between a few pre-set themes. They are equally bad as the presets seen in DDG. and there are no further tweaks you can make to enhance the visual experience. What StartPage does offer, is an option to select a continent when it comes to the server you connect to. But that’s it. Click to see all the available StartPage settings. • Saving your settings – No cloud setting here but an option to save your settings as a cookie or as a URL (which acts as a cloud saved setting). If you frequently clear cookies from your browser or don’t accept them to begin with, the URL option is for you. Once you configure the settings to your liking, generate the URL and bookmark it, set it as your homepage or install it as a custom search engine in your browser. We covered quite a bit of ground here and kudos for making it this far. Surely you’re wondering about security and privacy at this point so let’s get to it. Interesting Partnerships DuckDuckGo and Amazon – DuckDuckGo uses Amazon AWS for hosting, which explains the speed at which it’s able to crank out search results. One of the problems with using Amazon is the location the company is based in, more on that below. Privacy may be another concern. According to Amazon’s Data Privacy FAQ “Disclosure of customer content: We do not disclose customer content unless we’re required to do so to comply with the law or a valid and binding order of a governmental or regulatory body.” and by customer content they mean: “software (including machine images), data, text, audio, video or images that a customer or any end user transfers to us for processing, storage or hosting by AWS services in connection with that customer’s account and any computational results that a customer or any end user derives from the foregoing through their use of AWS services.” Your search query is typed text, sent to Amazon because that’s where DDG is hosted. Of course there is probably a lot more to it than that but as I do not know all the technical details, that’s how simple I see it. DuckDuckGo and Yahoo – On October 4, 2016, news was published showing Yahoo had secretly been scanning customer emails for the government. The “In partnership with Yahoo!” text that graced DuckDuckGo’s pages (Still visible in the screenshots I took while writing this article) was quickly removed, as was their webpage that explained the Yahoo partnership and technical details. Luckily the internet never forgets so this page can be viewed here if you want to see the partnership and technical details. DuckDuckGo has been working with Yahoo since the very beginning, most people just weren’t aware until the partnership was officially announced. Reactions to the news can be seen here in a blog post they failed to remove. Despite the somewhat lame attempts to distance themselves from the Yahoo brand the partnership, which was renewed in July, is still active and on the back-end nothing has changed. Yahoo and privacy do not mix in most people’s heads. Even if the recent news had nothing to do with web searches, it’s still an uncomfortable feeling. DuckDuckGo states: “Of course, in accordance with our strict privacy policy, we do not share personal information with any partners, including Yahoo.” and Yahoo states: “Unless explicitly provided by users through the search queries themselves, Yahoo does not receive any unique identifiers of individuals conducting searches on DuckDuckGo. Yahoo does not attempt to identify individuals through their use of the DuckDuckGo search services.” This may be enough to reassure you your searches are safe and anonymous. For many people it has not been. After all not even Yahoo’s own security team knew about the email scanning that was implemented, there may be other programs at work that monitor and log search data that no-one knows about. Speculation, sure but the point is; Yahoo’s reputation is shot. The trust is gone. StartPage and Yahoo – No partnerships there. Their site ixquick.eu did serve up anonymized Yahoo search results but stopped doing so when the previously mentioned Yahoo news became public. Location You might wonder, why is location relevant? The biggest concern is government surveillance, something on a lot of people’s minds ever since Snowden. DuckDuckGo is a U.S. based company and their hosting is done on Amazon servers. Amazon is a U.S. based company which means it’s subject to U.S. legal pressure. The same of course goes for Yahoo which is already known for implementing surveillance tools and spying on their customers for the government. Being subject to surveillance mandates like PRISM and laws like the U.S. Patriot Act make it a less than desirable location for anything you want to keep private and secure. StartPage is based in The Netherlands, where privacy is protected by law, so it is not subject to the same mandates and laws which is one (BIG) less thing to worry about. They own and operate their own servers in colocated facilities both in the U.S. and internationally. Every search engine I’m aware of hosts servers in multiple countries, DuckDuckGo and StartPage are no different. Of course the facility/company hosting the StartPage servers in the U.S. can be compromised by the government and because of gag orders StartPage will likely not know if there is any tampering with their servers or any data being intercepted. However in this case it’s Amazon and Yahoo VS unknown company somewhere. Who do you feel is a better host/location for your search queries? Of course you can set StartPage to just use a server in the EU or Asia instead and not use the U.S. server at all. When it comes to privacy, location is a big deal. A U.S. company’s privacy intentions, no matter how sincere, can be derailed if it’s served a national security letter. As those always include a gag order, the public won’t know if their information is compromised until it is too late. Logging Nothing has changed here. Your IP address, search query, what site you came from and what site you click on in the results, none of this is logged. That is, by the search engine operators themselves. In the case of DuckDuckGo it’s hard to say if Amazon and/or Yahoo log any sensitive data flowing to and from their servers. Encryption Both sites use strong encryption with TLS. Pretty much the standard but let’s have a virtual expert take a look at it. Using Qualys SSL Labs I pulled up both sites and got the following results: StartPageDuckDuckGo Enough said, certificate security is not an issue on either site. If you want to analyze a full breakdown of the results just visit Qualys SSL Labs and plug in the domain you want to check. And the title of most private search engine goes to: DuckDuckGo is superior when it comes to the user experience but a smooth interface is not their selling point, privacy is. And when it comes to privacy, StartPage is the obvious choice. Both engines need work in certain areas and there is no telling where we’ll be another 3 years down the road. Going into this I expected DDG to come out on top but tally all of the above and it’s StartPage that takes home the prize. So what do I use now, what’s my go-to search engine? The answer; it depends on what I’m searching for. My browsers on the Mac are configured to use StartPage by default but if I have to spend a lot of time searching for stuff, have a bunch of tabs open and am on a time crunch, I use DuckDuckGo. Just for the speed and how easy the results page is on my eyes. Being able to scan a page full of results in just a few seconds is a big deal for me and just isn’t something I can do with StartPage. The ads displayed by StartPage are annoying too. They take up too much space, are not labeled as ads clearly enough and their positioning forces me to scroll down unless what I’m looking for is in the first 4 results. At least DDG lets you disable ads in the settings. Then again I am willing to deal with it if privacy is a concern. If StartPage puts some effort in the visual, customizable user experience, it would be a huge step forward. Likewise if DuckDuckGo introduces a proxy feature like StartPage has and at least provides server location options, they would improve a lot. Or maybe they should just merge and give us one engine with the best of both worlds ? In short (too late for that now, I know), they are both solid search engines that take your privacy serious and between both of them, you won’t need another search engine again. StartPage has been very quick and helpful in answering any questions I had while writing this article. I reached out to DuckDuckGo twice over the course of 3 weeks but never heard back. I invite both StartPage and DuckDuckGo to contact me if they wish to dispute/correct any information in this article or simply to provide more information. Rather than waiting another 3 years I will likely edit any changes directly into this article (a changelog will be kept). Article source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
straycat19 Posted October 25, 2016 Share Posted October 25, 2016 I found that I actually get more relevant results in google, though I use duckduckgo as my default search engine. If it doesn't give me what I am looking for then I use google. Since I only connect using VPNs I don't care if they try to track me or my web searches since nothing is retained on my system and I don't login to anything while using those search engines.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pc71520 Posted October 25, 2016 Share Posted October 25, 2016 18 minutes ago, straycat19 said: I found that I actually get more relevant results in google Unfortunately, Google offers more results... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avmad Posted October 25, 2016 Share Posted October 25, 2016 Looks like i'll be sticking with startpage. DDG with Yahoo and Amazon would worry me if I used it. I'm sure there was a big reason I mostly kept away from using it in the past but I can't remember why, maybe SP was just better. Nowdays it feels like a lot of software is probably sending data to who knows where. Windows 10 for example. I doubt I have all the spying covered, it's a lot of work to keep up with when you use a lot of software. I never have ads with SP. (using Adguard) Do people here use search suggestions when typing? I always thought that was a no no privacy wise, but maybe i'm wrong. I always search on SP home page (with my configured settings) Was an interesting read. Thanks for posting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metatron Posted October 25, 2016 Share Posted October 25, 2016 5 hours ago, Batu69 said: but the default settings are the best I believe. The default settings aren't the best, DDG Custom HP 5 hours ago, Batu69 said: They are equally bad as the presets seen in DDG. I'll agree to disagree, SP Custom HP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
funkyy Posted October 25, 2016 Share Posted October 25, 2016 Batu69...an excellent read...very interesting and informative. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator DKT27 Posted October 25, 2016 Administrator Share Posted October 25, 2016 My problem with these are censorship. While Google too contains censorship, in images for example, but that can be bypassed with proper wording, but these do not show uncensored results even when searches are worded differently, atleast the time I checked them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Togijak Posted October 25, 2016 Share Posted October 25, 2016 I do it on the same way like straycat19 with one different, my default search engin is https://searx.me/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pc71520 Posted October 26, 2016 Share Posted October 26, 2016 Startpage reveals your User Agent to www's Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avmad Posted October 28, 2016 Share Posted October 28, 2016 On 25/10/2016 at 11:38 PM, DKT27 said: My problem with these are censorship. While Google too contains censorship, in images for example, but that can be bypassed with proper wording, but these do not show uncensored results even when searches are worded differently, atleast the time I checked them. Do you mean adult sites and videos etc as censorship, I don't think you do but just incase you can change things in the settings. Turn off family filter and Do not filter my results. I create my own home page url with the settings I like but sometimes it reverts the settings. Probably my fault with new tab homepage or something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator DKT27 Posted October 28, 2016 Administrator Share Posted October 28, 2016 7 hours ago, avmad said: Do you mean adult sites and videos etc as censorship, I don't think you do but just incase you can change things in the settings. Turn off family filter and Do not filter my results. I create my own home page url with the settings I like but sometimes it reverts the settings. Probably my fault with new tab homepage or something. Try searching on DDG images, even with all the filters disabled. Still does not easily show relevant results here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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