Safe surfing without tracking, with Startpage and Vivaldi
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Bye Bye, Big Tech! Itβs time to look for alternatives. Vivaldi and Startpage allow you to browse safely.
Click here to see the full blog post
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Startpage is a pretty good search engine, and their "Anonymous View" proxy for results works great.
Vivaldi should update their bundled search engine with a working search suggestions URL:
https://www.startpage.com/suggestions?format=opensearch&segment=startpage.vivaldi&q=%s
The
opensearch
format parameter had to be guessed, maybe they don't want others to know but it still works (for now) -
@ThinkerBe Search suggestion URL for StartPage in OpenSearch standard, can be added in Settings > Search for Startpage.
$ curl "https://www.startpage.com/suggestions?format=opensearch&segment=startpage.vivaldi&q=vivaldi" ["vivaldi", ["vivaldi", "vivaldi technologies", "vivaldi the red priest", "vivaldi web browser", "vivaldi antenna", "vivaldi potato", "vivaldi mail", "vivaldi's introduzioni", "vivaldi residences cubao", "vivaldi browser"]]
I wonder what a "Vivaldi potato" is... must be the laptops some users use for opening 2000 tabs and complaining the browser is slow
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Startpage is a excellent search engine with it's own proxie. I use it a lot for general searches, also Groot but in first line as my default I use Andisearch, apart of direct answers, it has the advantage of a reader view, that permits to read the page, without the need to visit it, which is a better solution than a proxie.
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@Catweazle
I didn't know https://andisearch.com/ yet.
Very good tip, thank you.Open source:
https://github.com/andisearch'Andisearch' seems to be quite new, there is no Wikipedia article yet.
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Shared this article and 'Andisearch' on 'Jabber/XMPP'.
xmpp:[email protected]?join -
Startpage has Dutch origins and is currently owned by System1, an advertising company. I think this is something Vivaldi users should to be aware of.
There was quite some controversy about it in the tech community after System1 acquired Startpage in 2019. They promised that Startpage would stay independent, but I think we all know how this often develops.
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@plelivel
Yes, these controversies are well known.
But now someone is in the wordhttps://vivaldi.com/blog/browsercast-vivaldi-and-startpage-ceos-join-forces-on-data-privacy-day/
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/63870/startpage-search-has-a-marketing-owner?_=1662110556832
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@ingolftopf , yes, Andisearch is still in alpha phase, although it works quite well and is in massive development. If it doesn't find an expression, which can still happen from time to time, it also offers a normal websearch using DDG and others and then works as a front-end for these. I am quite in contact with the 2 developers on Discord, Jed White and "Miami Angie", very nice people.Andi is planned later as freemium model, free for normal users and paid for corporatives, APIs and professional use, also a good buisiness model.
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@Catweazle
But 'Discord' is a problem:
"Discord's privacy policy authorises the company to transmit, collect and process all chats, messages and other data unencrypted into saleable data."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord
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@ingolftopf , I know, but I only use it for this, because FB, Twitter and Instagram are worse.
Companies use this social networks to contact with the people, also Vivaldi. It don't bother me much, there are no private data of me in Discord, apart from the account mail, the messages there are not so relevant and with Vivaldi and some extensions I use, there are no much what they can collect. -
@Catweazle
There are very good open source alternatives for this, such as 'Jabber/XMPP'.
More people join in, better they become -
@ingolftopf , there are a lot more of these descentralized networks, I know, but companies use those with the most users.
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Bye bye big tech!? Seems you're going to put aside chromium and start from scratch!
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@Pathduck said in Safe surfing without tracking, with Startpage and Vivaldi:
Startpage is a pretty good search engine
After they removed their advanced search page, I'd hesatate to call them a good search engine! I'd take Startpage over Google, but that's not saying much.
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First time I hear about Startpage, is it better than duckduckgo?
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@dynamix , it's relative,the privacy is similar but due to the engines (Google, Bing) the results are way different, the reason to use several different search engines, like Metager, Qwant, Mojeek, Andi, Groot, Whoogle, etc., if you want a maximum result in your searches and be able to compare them.
The worst thing about search engines that do not respect privacy, logging searches like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., is to create a so-called Bubble Filter, that is, similar to asking someone who always agrees with you, even if you are wrong (in Google a flatearther always wil find articles and blogs which confirm this in the first place in the results), this is avoided with these private search engines that I mentioned, offering neutral results. -
I prefer ddg because it has bangs. Bangs are excellent
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@eyupp , Andisearch too, same as in DDG
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If you want the best search ability you should use a metasearch engine that searches all the others you would normally use.
Getting an aggregated set of results shows you where the blind spots are in the various services.
That means you can directly compare Bing and Google, or Startpage, DDG and Quant.
Maybe you only want search results from tech and science sources, or only from media sources.
Mix and match or search them all with Searx (open source).My own blog previously covered the topic of using Startpage as your first Google alternative, but points out the advantages of other search options.
You may find some of the other specific search engines fit your needs.
https://dr-flay.vivaldi.net/is-google-holding-you-back/