Startpage

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 19 August 2026

What Startpage is, and where its results actually come from

Startpage is a search front end. It has no crawler — no software of its own that fetches pages from the web — and therefore no index, meaning no stored copy of the web it could rank. What it has is a relationship with the companies that do.

The mechanism is simple. You type a query into Startpage. Startpage's servers pass that query on to third-party search engines, without your IP address, your cookies or any account identifier attached. Those engines answer Startpage, not you. Startpage returns their results on its own page, with trackers removed and nothing logged against you. Google and Microsoft see Startpage's infrastructure making a request; they do not see the person who typed it.

The sentence most readers arrive with is "Startpage gives you Google's results privately." That was exactly right for fourteen years and has been incomplete since 14 March 2023, when Startpage announced a partnership with Microsoft that added Bing web results and Bing advertising to some results pages. Startpage's own support documentation now states that it submits queries to Google and Bing on the user's behalf. The precise position, as of August 2026, is: Startpage relays your query to Google and Bing. Not Google alone, and — despite a claim that circulated widely in late 2023 — not Bing alone either.

None of this is a criticism. Reselling is Startpage's product, stated openly, and it is why the results are as good as they are: no independent index in the world matches Google on the long tail. The verdict on this page reads resold results because that is the structural fact, not because it is a failing.

What Startpage adds of its own

If the results come from elsewhere, what exactly is a user paying for with their attention? Three things, and they are real.

The anonymising relay itself. Startpage sits between the user and the supplier. Google receives a query from a Dutch company's servers with no user identity attached, so it cannot attach that query to a profile, a session or an advertising identifier. This is the entire product and it works because Startpage is the only party that ever sees both halves.

Anonymous View. A one-click proxy that loads the destination site through Startpage's servers, so the page you click through to does not see your IP address and cannot set cookies on you. It is genuinely distinctive — nothing else in the privacy-search field offers it as smoothly — and it extends the privacy guarantee past the results page, which is where most privacy engines stop.

A results page without behavioural targeting. Ads on Startpage are sold against the words in the query rather than against a profile assembled from a user's history, on the stated basis that Startpage holds no such profile to target.

What it does not add is ranking. Startpage makes no judgement about which result is better; it inherits the ordering its suppliers produce. If Google demotes a site, Startpage demotes it. If Bing omits something, Startpage omits it. The privacy layer changes who is watching. It does not change what you are shown.

Who owns Startpage

This is the part of the Startpage story that a reader is most likely to have wrong, and it deserves stating carefully because both halves are true at once.

The service is operated by Surfboard Holding B.V., based in Zeist in the Netherlands, led by co-founder Robert E. G. Beens. The operating company is Dutch, subject to Dutch and EU law including the GDPR, and that jurisdiction is the backbone of Startpage's pitch: an operating entity outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act and FISA §702.

Since 31 December 2018, however, Surfboard Holding has been majority-owned by Privacy One Group Ltd., a subsidiary of System1 — a US performance-advertising company based in Marina del Rey, California, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as SST. System1 co-founder Michael Blend joined the parent board at the time of the investment. The stake was not disclosed publicly until October 2019, roughly nine months later.

The disclosure caused real damage to Startpage's standing. PrivacyTools.io removed it from its recommendations, citing the undisclosed gap and unanswered questions about the exact ownership percentage and the specific data-sharing arrangements; Startpage was later reinstated after clarifying that its founders retain unilateral authority to reject changes that would compromise privacy. Independent reporting at the time noted that Startpage declined to state System1's exact stake or the data-sharing terms. As of August 2026 no published audit resolves that question.

The tension to name plainly: Startpage's revenue is advertising revenue, and its majority owner's stated business is inferring consumer intent from a large variety of proprietary data. Startpage's answer is that the two operations are firewalled and that founder veto authority protects the privacy model. That answer may well be correct. It has not been independently verified, and a reader deciding whether to trust Startpage is being asked to trust a corporate arrangement rather than a technical guarantee.

Privacy: what is claimed, and what has been checked

The claims and the verified findings are different sets, and conflating them is how most write-ups about Startpage go wrong.

What Startpage states. It does not record user IP addresses, a position it says has held since January 2009. It sets no tracking cookies, keeps no personal data logs, and builds no behavioural profile. Settings are stored on the user's device or encoded in a URL rather than against an account. Anonymous View proxies the destination page. It operates under Dutch and EU law.

What has been independently certified. Startpage was awarded the European Privacy Seal (EuroPriSe) in 2011, and recertified in 2013 and 2015 — the first search engine to hold it. That is a genuine third-party assessment and it is worth taking seriously.

It is also, by August 2026, more than a decade old. The seals predate the System1 majority investment of December 2018 and predate the Bing integration of March 2023 — the two events that changed most about how Startpage is owned and where its results come from. No recertification covering either was found in the research for this page. Printing "EU privacy certified" about Startpage without the years attached is the single most misleading thing a page can say about it.

The honest summary is that Startpage's current privacy position rests on the company's own word, an architecture that plausibly supports it, and a certification that has not been refreshed since 2015. That is better than most engines can claim. It is not continuing independent verification, and it should not be described as such.

History: how a metasearch engine became a proxy

Startpage's history is genuinely confusing because two products with different architectures merged under one brand.

1998 — Ixquick is founded by David Bodnick in New York: a true metasearch engine, blending results from roughly fourteen sources. Separately, on 28 January 1998, the Startpage.com domain launches as a web directory.
2000 — Surfboard Holding B.V. acquires Ixquick and operations move to the Netherlands.
2003 — Startpage.com begins mirroring Ixquick.
23 March 2005 — Ixquick relaunches with a rebuilt metasearch algorithm.
January 2009 — Startpage and Ixquick stop recording user IP addresses.
7 July 2009 — Startpage.com is reconfigured to draw exclusively on Google's results. This is the birth of the product people know today, and the end of Startpage as a many-source metasearch service.
2011 — the EuroPriSe seal is awarded; recertified 2013 and 2015.
2013 — the Snowden disclosures drive a surge of interest in EU-hosted, non-logging search.
29 March 2016 — Ixquick and Startpage merge under the Startpage brand; the Ixquick domains are retired by 2 April 2018.
2018 — Anonymous View is introduced.
31 December 2018 — System1, via Privacy One Group, takes a majority stake. It is not disclosed until October 2019.
2019 — a Bing-sourced news vertical is added; the ownership disclosure triggers the PrivacyTools delisting.
14 March 2023 — Startpage announces a custom private-search product built with Microsoft over roughly two years, adding Bing web results and Bing ads to some results pages, along with mapping and local data from MapQuest and HERE Technologies, weather from Tomorrow.io, and a partner called Search Expander. The announcement came through System1's investor relations and is badly under-reported.
October 2023 — a widely-shared Privacy Guides thread claims Startpage has dropped Google entirely in favour of Bing. The claim overshoots and is corrected within the thread itself: the answer is both.

One consequence of that lineage is worth stating: Startpage is not Ixquick under a new name. Ixquick queried many engines and combined them. Startpage queries two and relays them. The brands merged; the products did not.

AI features, or the lack of them

Startpage has been notably slow to add generative AI compared with its peers, and has positioned that reticence as deliberate. As of August 2026 the results page is conventional links, instant answers and knowledge panels — the latter arriving through the March 2023 partner integrations and pulled from those partners rather than generated.

No primary source confirming a Startpage-branded generative answer product, its model provider, or a toggle to turn one off was found in the research for this page. That is an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence, and this page states it as such: as of August 2026, no such launch is documented, and a reader should check the product itself rather than rely on any secondary description, including this one.

Who it suits, and who it does not

It suits a reader whose objection to Google is surveillance rather than result quality. If you want mainstream, high-calibre results without an engine building a profile from them, Startpage is the most direct answer available: no independent index matches Google and Bing on the long tail, and Startpage hands you those results with the observation removed. Anonymous View is a genuine feature nothing else does as well. And EU jurisdiction for the operating entity is a real advantage over US-domiciled privacy engines — with the ownership caveat above attached to it.

It is the wrong tool for anyone whose actual goal is to reduce Google and Microsoft's grip on search. Every Startpage query is, in the end, a Google or Bing query, paid for. The money keeps flowing to the incumbents; only the data stops. A reader who wants their searching to support search diversity is looking for an engine with its own crawler — Mojeek and Brave Search are the honest answers there, and Startpage does not pretend otherwise.

It is also a poor fit for professional research where provenance matters. Startpage does not disclose which supplier answered which query, publishes no split between Google-sourced and Bing-sourced results, and offers no way for a user to tell. Anyone who states a percentage is guessing. If you need to cite where a result came from, you cannot.

Finally, there is the dependency risk. Startpage has no crawler, no index and no fallback. If either supplier raised prices, changed terms or withdrew access, there is nothing underneath. That is not hypothetical in a market where search-syndication terms are under active regulatory scrutiny.

The fair one-line summary: a good privacy proxy, not an independent engine, majority-owned by an advertising company, with privacy certifications that have not been refreshed in over a decade.

Frequently asked questions

Does Startpage still use Google?

Yes, but not only Google. From 7 July 2009 until March 2023 Startpage served Google results exclusively. On 14 March 2023 it announced a partnership with Microsoft that added Bing web results and Bing ads to some results pages. Startpage's own support documentation now names both providers. A widely shared claim from October 2023 that Startpage had dropped Google entirely was corrected: the answer is both.

Does Startpage have its own search index?

No. Startpage operates no web crawler and holds no index of its own. It is a privacy proxy: it forwards your query from its own servers to Google and Bing, strips identifying information, and relays their results back to you. This is the deliberate design of the product rather than a shortcoming — its selling point is mainstream result quality without the mainstream surveillance.

Who owns Startpage?

The service is operated by Surfboard Holding B.V. of Zeist, the Netherlands. Since 31 December 2018 Surfboard has been majority-owned by Privacy One Group Ltd., a subsidiary of System1, a US performance-advertising company listed on the NYSE as SST. The stake was not publicly disclosed until October 2019. Startpage states its founders retain veto authority over privacy-affecting changes.

Is Startpage really private?

Its architecture supports the claim: Google and Bing see Startpage's servers, not you. Startpage states it has not recorded user IP addresses since January 2009 and builds no behavioural profile. But these are company statements. The independent certification it holds, the European Privacy Seal, dates from 2011 with recertifications in 2013 and 2015 — before both the System1 ownership and the Bing integration.

Is Startpage the same as Ixquick?

No, though the brands merged on 29 March 2016 and the Ixquick domains were retired in 2018. Ixquick, founded in 1998, was a genuine metasearch engine blending roughly fourteen sources. Startpage as it exists today dates from 7 July 2009, when it was reconfigured to relay a single supplier's results. Same company, different architecture: many sources combined versus two sources relayed.

Does using Startpage stop Google making money from me?

No. Startpage pays Google, and since 2023 Microsoft, for access to their results. The commercial relationship with the incumbents is preserved; what stops is the flow of your personal data into their profiles. If your goal is to weaken Google and Microsoft's position in search rather than to hide from them, a proxy is structurally the wrong instrument and an engine with its own crawler is the right one.

Is Startpage a Dutch company?

The operating company is: Surfboard Holding B.V. is based in Zeist and the service is subject to Dutch and EU law including the GDPR, which is central to Startpage's pitch. The majority owner is not — System1 is a US-listed advertising company in California. Whether US legal process could reach Startpage user data through the parent has not been tested in any public court record found for this page.

How much of the search market does Startpage have?

There is no reliable figure. StatCounter, the source usually cited for search-engine market share, does not break Startpage out separately; it falls within "Other". Startpage has published query-volume claims at various points, but none was confirmable from a dated primary source, and historic self-reported figures should not be treated as current. Its owner System1 files with the SEC but reports properties in aggregate.