Startpage is a web search engine that highlights privacy as its distinguishing feature. Previously, it was known as the metasearch engineIxquick, At that time, Startpage was a variant service. Both sites were merged in 2016. Ixquick was founded by David Bodnick in 1998 and has been owned by Startpage B.V., based in the Netherlands, since acquiring the internet company in 2000. Ixquick and its sibling project, Startpage.com, reached their latest record daily direct queries of 5.7 million on 2 February 2015. After that, Startpage BV was acquired by the Privacy One Group. The company also provides the stand-alone proxy service, Startpage.com Proxy, which is incorporated into the Startpage search engine. It allows users the option to open all search results via proxy. The company also has developed a privacy-protecting email service, called StartMail. This service was released to the public in 2014.
History
Ixquick was created in 1998 by David Bodnick in New York City. He is a graduate of Brown University. It later received the tagline "Most powerful meta search engine on the web!". Initially, it provided metasearch for 14 different web and directory search engines as well as images, news, and MP3 engines. Results were sorted after evaluating how relevant each of the search tools found the query. Ixquick was given the highest ratings for a search engine by Search Engine Watch and ZDNet's SearchIQ. The site received a facelift in 2000, with a dark-blue theme incorporating the planet Earth, with the tagline "the world's most powerful metasearch engine!". The Dutch company, Surfboard Holding BV, based in Zeist, purchased Ixquick in 2000. Ixquick was re-launched on 23 March 2005 with new features including a redesigned metasearch algorithm, an international telephone and lowest-price directory. On 27 June 2006, following criticism of Google Shopping, Ixquick.com began to delete private details of its users. IP addresses and other personal information were deleted within 48 hours of a search. Ixquick has stated that it does not share the personal information of users with other search engines or with the provider of its sponsored results. Ixquick was awarded the first European Privacy Seal for its privacy practices on 14 July 2008. This European Union-sponsored initiative guarantees compliance with EU laws and regulations on data security and privacy through a series of design and technical audits. It was re-certified together with Startpage in 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015. On 28 January 2009, Ixquick completely ended the recording of user IP addresses. On 7 July 2009, Ixquick launched Startpage.com to offer its service at a URL that is both easier to remember and spell. In contrast to Ixquick.eu, Startpage.com fetches results from the Google search engine. This is done without saving user IP addresses or giving any personal user information to Google's servers. On 29 March 2016, Ixquick.com was officially "merged" with the same company's Startpage search engine . Now, users entering Ixquick.com are automatically re-routed to Startpage.com. Ixquick had long declared on its sites that it operated in compliance with European Union privacy standards and it retained its original European search engine, Ixquick.eu, until about April 2018 when it was also redirected to Startpage.com. Prior to the release of Tor Browser version 4.5, Startpage.com was its default search engine. In October 2019, Startpage BV was acquired by the Privacy One Group, owned by adtech company System1, leading to privacy concerns. Many of those concerns were alleviated by May 2020.
