Day 83 - StartPage search? P.S. I am sticking with Chrome

11 May 2017 100daysofwriting · browsers · chrome · twitter

Talking about the tweet that got popular, there was in particular one user, @architex63, who had some radical opinions about another well meaning person who suggested that you might want to use StartPage Search if you want Google’s accuracy minus the Google’s tracking.

@marianstiehler @StartPageSearch @_icyflame @duckduckgo people in the know, know. I know a few of those people. I just try to warn people. can't really say why. do some research. good luck!

— Beeve Stannon (@architex63) May 11, 2017

I tried using classic.startpage.com and while the search results were accurate, the first three results were injected ads! They look exactly like the results and weren’t blocked by ublock. While ads are slightly annoying in general, and extremely annoying when they appear as the first thing that can be clicked in the results of a search, I might put up with them if I could be assured about the security of the search engine itself.

DDG was suggested by Snowden himself, and I tend to trust the guy who risked his life and did incredibly dangerous stuff against arguably the most powerful government just to prove a point to a large amount of people. StartPage search hasn’t had that kind of acceptance just yet.

Chrome seemed to be the common gripe among people, but frankly, I don’t see the angst against that. Brave for Android is a great browser and it’s the best for Android with in built ad blocking and HTTPS everywhere. For linux though, Chrome is the best that’s out there now. I have used Chromium, raved about the low RAM usage of Firefox, and even tried out there ones like Opera and Vivaldi, both of which kept hanging on me and just didn’t work.

I am not going to switch back to anything other than Chrome for a while now, I can’t see what I could switch to. Chromium’s open source version might be an option. For now though, Chrome + uBlock + Ghostery + DuckDuckGo is the best I am going to commit to using daily.

POST #83 is OVER