The Privacy Guides team reached out to Startpage back in 2020 to clear up any concerns with System1's sizeable investment into the service. We don't believe that to be an issue as they have a distinctly separate privacy policy. Startpage's majority shareholder is System1 who is an adtech company. They do not log your IP address, search queries, or other personally identifying information. According to their privacy policy, they log details such as: operating system, type of browser, and language. DuckDuckGo and Brave Search are friendlier options if your threat model requires hiding your IP address from the search provider. Startpage regularly limits service access to certain IP addresses, such as IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor. Some instances run as a Tor hidden service, which may grant some privacy as long as your search queries does not contain PII. Since SearXNG instances may be modified by their owners, they do not necessarily reflect their privacy policy.

When you are using a SearXNG instance, be sure to go read their privacy policy. You should be careful with where and how you are hosting SearXNG, as people looking up illegal content on your instance could draw unwanted attention from authorities.

When self-hosting, it is important that you have other people using your instance so that the queries would blend in. Your search queries will still be sent to the search engines that SearXNG gets its results from. SearXNG is a proxy between you and the search engines it aggregates from. It is an actively maintained fork of SearX. SearXNG is an open-source, self-hostable, metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing any information itself.

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