Startpage

One thing I like about search page startpage.com other than its claim of privacy is the display of dates along with the links. You can see how old a link is in many cases.

But, why does a search using the option "site:georgiapacking.org" find nothing or next to nothing? Do they not like us? Bing, duckduckgo, google, etc. finds many hits, but startpage really stands out with no hits or very few hits.

 

Only 1 from startpage



vs. pages from duckduckgo

 

There's only two filters, adult language and adult video. Language is set to Do not filter and video shouldn't matter. This only is an issue with startpage.

 

Seems unique to this site.



vs.



vs.

 

Maybe not, but they sure seem to have something against georgiapacking.org. I use several search engines and noticed the results were not the same as Google (without the tracking), which is startpage's claim. Just thought TPTB here might like to know, but maybe they already know that.

 

Maybe Startpage isn't even a search engine in the traditional sense.

 

I noticed when I went to Startpage's advanced page, instead of using "site", they used "host", but here's the result when I just drop the "site". Two hits returned.

 

On startpage, went to settings and selected "clear settings"
searched for "project veritas www.georgiapacking.org"
Using Firefox on a Windows 7 machine, I get 5 hits.
Using Firefox on a Linux Mint machine, I get 2 hits.
On the Linux box, google returned 67K hits (because "site:" is missing, so not surprising). With "site:", 6 hits.

Like I said, I use several search engines, so I'll just know not to do a site specific search for www.georgiapacking.org on startpage.

 

I can certainly get around it by using a different search engine for my "georgiapacking.org" queries, so I'm okay there. It does cause me concern if startpage is doing this for select sites, georgiapacking being one of them. If it is in fact happening to other "startpage" users, it would indicate that georgiapacking.org results are not being passed by to the person doing the query even if it is not site specific. I would think that would be a problem for you/the owners too. I'm not thrilled about getting incomplete results, but that is why I use multiple search engines.

If no one else can duplicate the issue, then it sounds isolated to me. No one else seems to be having the same issue or possibly not using startpage. At this point, I've given you as much info as I have, so I'll leave it up to you.
Thanks.

 

I would think the problem lies with startpage. They claim to take the query and pass it to google, so theoretically what I get from google I should also get back from startpage, just anonymously. startpage may not even have a crawler. I'm guessing they either filter the results, messed up the parse before passing to google or messed up the results before presenting it to me. My examples are limited, but georgiapacking has a rather low hit rate.

 

Said I was done, but did one more search. Frequently I use search engines because the search term is too short for a forum search, and they just (usually) work better.

On a different machine (Windows 7 w/Firefox) I searched google for "tsa site:www.georgiapacking.org" and had 745 hits. On that same machine I searched startpage and had one hit. I dropped the "site:" for "tsa www.georgiapacking.org" on startpage and had 8 hits.

Now I'm done.

 

As long as one doesn't care if startpage traffic doesn't find the forum, that's true.

If search engines start filtering out sites intentionally or inadvertently, it will make it more difficult to get real information out in order to get laws passed. Just a thought.