“Start protecting your privacy. Start searching with Startpage.”
That’s the new slogan for Ixquick, the Web search engine that is internationally recognized for having the best privacy practices in the business. Today Ixquick launches Startpage.com to give its users a new easier-to-remember way to access its established search services.
“For years, privacy experts have praised Ixquick for our outstanding policies, but some people found our name hard to spell,” explains Ixquick CEO Robert Beens. “With Startpage, people can get the same great features they know and love from Ixquick with a name that’s easier to use.”
The Ixquick website will remain online in addition to the new Startpage.com option. Both websites are powered by the same underlying search technology and are covered by the same certified privacy policies and practices.
“These two websites are almost identical and offer the same great search results. The only real difference is the name,” says Beens. “Whether people prefer to go to Startpage.com or Ixquick.com, they can search with equal confidence, knowing that their privacy is protected.”
Ixquick has earned a passionate following of Internet users who are concerned about keeping their searches private. All other major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, record every search query made through their websites and link them to the user’s IP address and cookies — a practice that has come under fire from both privacy and government groups recently.
Ixquick is the only major search engine that guarantees not to record IP addresses or record people’s searches. The company backs up that guarantee with third-party certification, and has been awarded the prestigious European Privacy Seal for adherence to exemplary privacy standards. In addition, Ixquick does not use so-called “tracking cookies,” and it is the only major search engine supporting HTTPS, a security feature that prevents data from being eavesdropped upon as it moves across the Internet.
Ixquick got its name in the 1990’s when company founder and current technology architect David Bodnick sought a way to represent both intelligence and speed. “I chose the ‘i’ in Ixquick to represent intelligence, the ‘x’ for ‘times,’ and the ‘quick’ for speed,” he explains. “People appreciate the fact that we’re not only the world’s most private search engine, but our results are smart and fast, too.”
“After more than a decade of providing top-quality search under the Ixquick name, we’re excited to now introduce Startpage,” said Beens. “Concerns about privacy have attracted many new users to our website lately and we want to make it easy for people to find us and spread the word.”
A Startpage result is awarded one star ( ) for every search engine that chooses it as one of the ten best results for your search. So a five star (    ) result means that five search engines agreed on the result. |
| This is significant because search engines choose results in different ways, and each approach works well in some cases and poorly in others. A result with many stars was chosen for many different reasons, and is a consensus choice of many search engines. |
| Also, while irrelevant Web pages can be “optimized” to fool a single search engine’s algorithm, it is much harder for a page to fool all the search engines. |
Source: Startpage.com