Ixquick: merged into Startpage in 2016

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 27 October 2026

What happened to Ixquick

Ixquick no longer exists as a separate search engine. In late March 2016 it was merged into Startpage, its sister service under the same Dutch owner, and the combined product was briefly branded "StartPage by Ixquick." The sources disagree on the exact day: a press release announcing the merger is dated 30 March 2016, gHacks gave the scheduled date as 26 March, and Wikipedia gives 29 March. All three agree on the month and the outcome.

The merger did not end the old product at once. After March 2016, ixquick.com served Startpage's results, while the traditional multi-engine Ixquick results were kept running at ixquick.eu. That holdout closed on 2 April 2018, together with ixquick.info and the Ixquick app. Anyone searching for "ixquick eu" today is looking for a service that has been gone for more than eight years.

What ixquick.com does today could not be checked directly for this page as of 27 October 2026: the site refuses automated fetching. The operator's 2016 release said Ixquick would deliver Startpage results, and Wikipedia cites a source reporting that ixquick.eu redirects to Startpage.com. A redirect to Startpage is the likely behavior, but this page does not state it as a verified fact.

The verdict here is no longer available, in the full sense: the brand was retired and its technology was not carried forward. Startpage did not inherit Ixquick's metasearch engine; it was always a different product.

Where its results came from: metasearch, not an index

Ixquick never crawled the web. It was a metasearch engine: it took a user's query, forwarded it to a panel of other search engines and directories, collected their result lists, removed duplicates, and re-ranked the combined list. It had no crawler (software that fetches pages and follows links) and no index (an engine's own stored copy of the web). Everything it showed had been found by someone else.

Its own contribution was the merge, and the merge had a distinctive rule. Ixquick used a star system: a result earned one star for each source engine that placed it in that engine's own top ten. Pages that many independent engines agreed on therefore rose to the top. The Internet Scout Report, reviewing the service on 19 May 2000, described it as searching fourteen engines and directories with exactly that star rule. Search Engine Journal gave the same fourteen-engine figure in September 2007, along with 18 interface languages.

The star idea is a clean statement of metasearch's founding premise: that agreement between engines is itself a relevance signal. That premise had a documented academic basis. When MetaCrawler launched at the University of Washington on 7 July 1995, querying six services, its authors justified it bluntly: "No single search service is sufficient... no single service is able to return more then 45% of the references followed by users." That measurement is historical and point-in-time, and all six services MetaCrawler queried are now defunct or transformed, but it is the argument Ixquick was built on.

Which engines Ixquick queried changed over the years, and no dated primary source lists the panel. Any page that names a fixed set ("Google, Yahoo and Bing") as Ixquick's sources is guessing.

Who ran it, and how it made money

Ixquick was created in 1998 by David Bodnick in New York City. The exact launch day has not been established. In 2000 it was acquired by Surfboard Holding B.V. of Zeist, the Netherlands, led by chief executive Robert E. G. Beens, the same company that operates Startpage. From then on Ixquick was a Dutch-run service. It was relaunched on 23 March 2005 with a redesigned metasearch algorithm.

The business model was advertising on results pages, the same model Startpage uses. There was no subscription. Ixquick never published revenue, and no audited usage figure for Ixquick on its own has been found. The only volume figure on record is the company's own: the March 2016 merger release said Ixquick and Startpage together handled more than 6 million search queries per day. That is self-reported and combines both services, so it says nothing reliable about Ixquick alone.

One ownership point is often confused. Surfboard Holding has been majority-owned since late 2018 by Privacy One Group, part of System1. That change came more than two years after Ixquick stopped being a separate product, so it is part of Startpage's story, not Ixquick's.

The privacy turn, and the first European Privacy Seal

From the mid-2000s Ixquick repositioned itself as a privacy search engine, and that is why it still matters. On 14 July 2008, in Kiel, Ixquick received the first European Privacy Seal (EuroPriSe) ever issued, presented by European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx. The scheme was run by the ULD, the data protection authority of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, then headed by Thilo Weichert. Privacy.org recorded it at the time as "the first ever European Privacy Seal for ICT products or IT-based services." Ixquick was not only the first search engine to hold the seal; it was the first IT service of any kind.

The policy behind the award was concrete. The 2008 release states that Ixquick deleted personal data such as IP addresses (the network address that identifies a user's connection) "within 48 hours," and remaining non-personal data within 14 days. Six months later, on Data Protection Day, 28 January 2009, Ixquick announced it had stopped storing users' IP addresses at all.

Two cautions apply. First, the certification document itself, the EuroPriSe short public report, could not be retrieved for this page, so its certificate number, validity period and exact scope are not known here. What is confirmed is the award, its date and the policy described in the press release. Second, Wikipedia dates the Startpage seal to 2011, with recertification in 2013 and 2015. That is a separate, Startpage-branded certification. Both dates are correct; the 2008 seal went to Ixquick, and it is wrong to say Startpage was first certified in 2008.

The timing is worth noting. Ixquick's seal arrived two years after AOL published about 20 million real user queries in August 2006 and journalists identified individual searchers from them. That incident is the background against which a deletion policy became a selling point.

How Ixquick and Startpage diverged, then merged

Ixquick and Startpage shared an owner from 2000 but were different products for most of that time. The split became explicit on 7 July 2009, when Startpage.com was reconfigured to serve Google results. From then on the two brands did different jobs:

Ixquick queried many engines and merged their answers by star count.
Startpage passed queries to Google and returned Google's results without passing the user's identity on.

A searcher who wanted many engines' opinions used one; a searcher who wanted Google's results without Google's tracking used the other. In late March 2016 the company folded them together, citing "changing market conditions." Startpage's single-source model was the one that survived.

There is an honest reading of that outcome. Metasearch depends on other engines continuing to answer its queries, and its quality is capped by theirs; Ixquick added a merge, not a source of new results. A product built that way has little defense if the engines it relies on change terms or the market moves toward one dominant source. Ixquick's real legacy was its privacy policy, and that was portable to Startpage. Its metasearch engine was not carried over.

Common misconceptions

"Ixquick had its own index." It never did. It was a metasearch engine throughout its life, with no crawler and no stored copy of the web.

"Ixquick and Startpage were the same thing." They had the same owner, but until 2016 they were different products: multi-engine metasearch on one side, a Google proxy on the other. Startpage later added Bing as a source as well.

"Ixquick still runs at ixquick.eu." It does not. ixquick.eu, the last home of the old metasearch results, was discontinued on 2 April 2018.

"Startpage won the first European Privacy Seal." The first seal, in July 2008, went to Ixquick. Startpage's own certification is dated 2011 by Wikipedia.

"Ixquick was founded in the Netherlands." It was created in New York in 1998 and moved to Dutch ownership in 2000.

Frequently asked questions

What happened to Ixquick?

Ixquick merged into Startpage, its sister service under the same Dutch owner, in late March 2016; the merger release is dated 30 March 2016. The old multi-engine results were kept at ixquick.eu until 2 April 2018, when ixquick.eu, ixquick.info and the Ixquick app were all discontinued. There is no separate Ixquick search engine today.

Does ixquick.com still work?

Not as Ixquick. After the 2016 merger the operator said ixquick.com would deliver Startpage results, and reporting indicates the Ixquick domains redirect to Startpage. That could not be independently confirmed for this page as of 27 October 2026, because the site refuses automated checks. Either way, the original metasearch engine no longer runs anywhere.

What was ixquick.eu?

ixquick.eu was where the traditional Ixquick metasearch results lived on after the March 2016 merger, while ixquick.com switched to Startpage's results. It was the last working copy of the original product. It was discontinued on 2 April 2018, along with ixquick.info and the Ixquick app.

Is Startpage the same as Ixquick?

No, although the same company ran both from 2000. Ixquick was a metasearch engine that merged results from many engines using a star ranking. Startpage, from July 2009, re-served Google's results without passing on the user's identity. The company merged the two in 2016 and kept Startpage's model, not Ixquick's.

Did Ixquick have its own search index?

No. Ixquick was a metasearch engine. It forwarded each query to other search engines and directories, fourteen of them according to a 2000 review, then merged and re-ranked their results. A result earned a star for each source engine that placed it in its top ten. It never crawled the web itself.

Was Ixquick private?

It was the first search engine, and the first IT service of any kind, to receive the European Privacy Seal, on 14 July 2008. At that point it deleted IP addresses within 48 hours, and from 28 January 2009 it stopped storing them at all. The certification report itself could not be retrieved, so its exact scope is not documented here.

Who created Ixquick?

David Bodnick created Ixquick in New York City in 1998. In 2000 it was acquired by Surfboard Holding B.V. of Zeist, the Netherlands, led by Robert E. G. Beens, which also operates Startpage. Ixquick was relaunched with a redesigned metasearch algorithm on 23 March 2005.

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