Moving to Startpage for search

As a user and fan of DuckDuckGo for several years, I am a little disappointed to say that I’m switching my default search engine to startpage.com.

This change has felt inevitable for a few months now. Several times each day I have to re-run my DuckDuckGo search using Startpage because DDG fails to find something I’m sure should be somewhere on the first page of results.

Today, for example, I was linking to Maciej Cegłowski’s article about securing congressional campaigns. I can never remember how to spell his name, so I typed idle words pinboard author” into DDG and this is what I got back…

DuckDuckGo SearchDuckDuckGo Search

That wasn’t helpful, so I ran the same search using Startpage and got this…

Startpage SearchStartpage Search

See what I mean? And this isn’t a rare exception. I want to support non-Google and privacy-focused alternatives when it makes sense. I rely on search all day long and need better results than I’ve been getting from DuckDuckGo, so for now it’s going to be Startpage