Difference Between Ixquick Duckduckgo and Startpage

The key difference between Ixquick Duckduckgo and Startpage is in the search engines they use; Duckduck has its own search engine whereas Ixquick uses ten search engines and Startpage uses Google search engine. However, all of them help protect your privacy, IP address and personal information.  Let’s us take a closer look at these search engines and see what they have to offer.

CONTENTS
1. Overview and Key Difference
2. What is Ixquick
3. What is Duckduckgo
4. What is Startpage
5. Side by Side Comparison – Ixquick vs Duckduckgo vs Startpage
6. Summary

What is Ixquick?

Ixquick is a meta search engine. It is based in Netherlands and New York. Ixquick distinguishes privacy as a key feature in comparison with other internet search engines. This search engine was founded by David Bodnick in 1998. It is owned by Surfboard Holding BV in Netherland. This was acquired by the internet company in 2000.

Ixquick also comes with a standalone proxy service. Ixquick is also incorporated into quick and startup page search engines. This allows all users to open all search results via proxy. Ixquick is in the process of developing an email service with privacy protection known as StartMail.

Ixquick came with many new features as it was relaunched in 2005. It came with many new features like a redesigned metasearch algorithm, low priced directory, and an international phone. In June 2006, Ixquick started to delete private details of users. Private information and IP addresses were deleted within 48 hours of a search. Ixquick confirms that it does not share user information with other search engines or provider of sponsored results.

Ixquick was the first to receive the European Privacy Seal (EuroPriSe) for its practices in privacy. This guarantees compliance with EU regulation on data privacy and security through technical and design audits. In the year 2009, Ixquick completely ended user IP recording. In March 2016, Ixquick was discontinued in the US. It officially merged with its own Startpage search engine and users who enter Ixquick will be redirected automatically to startpage.com. If the user does not prefer to use startpage.com the option is still available to use Ixquick.eu. As Ixquick.eu retain and runs in accordance with the European Union privacy standard, it is preferred over ixquick.com and start page.

Ixquick is designed to return top ten results of multiple search engines. It uses a “Star system ” in ranking results. The results are awarded a star for a result returned by other search engines. The top results produced by Ixquick will be the one that has been returned by most search engines. Ixquick is able to search in 17 languages. Each of these languages includes local search engines.

Ixquick only uses one cookie which is called “preferences” to remember search preferences of users for futures search results. If the user does not visit Ixquick for 90 days, this data will be deleted. You can save your preference in the bookmarked URL and completely avoid cookies. Preference are not saved automatically either. The visitor will be able to decide whether to save the preferences.

What is Duckduckgo?

State surveillance, security breaches has caused wide concerns regarding data sharing and us wanting to protect our privacy. After being under the radar for over nine years, the anonymous search engine called DuckDuckGo is making strides in the current climate.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that does not track you. It does not use cookies to follow users. It also does not collect personal information of users who use it. Even your IP address will be hidden during searching for results. It will protect even the search history from the company itself.

When compared with Google and Bing, search terms are sent to the site via HTTP referrer header. The computer will automatically share information like your IP address. Information like this can be used to identify you.

DuckDuckGo refers to this as search leakage and prevents this from happening from its search engine. When you click on a site, it redirects that request to prevent search terms being sent to other sites. The sites will know you visited them but will not know the search terms that you entered. The site cannot use personal information in order to identify you either. DuckDuckGo comes in an encrypted version. This will automatically change links to point to an encrypted version for major sites. Search leakage can be prevented by the use of a proxy. DuckDuckGo operated in a mode known as Toe exit enclave, which provides end to end encrypted and anonymous data. When a proxy domain is used with DuckDuckGo, it will be a route through a proxy. But proxies are slow and free proxies are usually funded by advertisements.

The user can also choose the protection by toggling the redirect on the settings page or by changing the address bar settings.

Many search engines will collect data on you to sell it to advertisers. DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, uses a different approach. It uses keywords to make money.

According to the keyword, you type in; you will get an advertisement. Law enforcement requests are not received by DuckDuckGo as there is no data to be requested.

What is Startpage?

Startpage.com was launched by Ixquick to offer its features with an easy to remember and spell URL. When compared with ixquick.com, stratpage.com fetches its results from Google’s search engine. This is performed without saving the IP address of the user or giving out any personal information out onto Google servers.

Both Ixquick and start page are owned by the same company and offer the same level of protection. Ixquick uses around 10 different search engines to produce your results whereas Startpage only uses Google’s results. You can determine which one to use after you have each search engine for a while. Both search engines strip away personal information, so Google will not know your search for the results.

Information like your IP, what site you came from, what sites you click on results, search queries will not be logged in.

What is the difference between Ixquick Duckduckgo, and Startpage?

Summary – Ixquick vs Duckduckgo vs Startpage

All the above search engines mainly target in protecting your privacy. They have unique features that differentiate each other. Thus, the difference between Ixquick Duckduckgo and Startpage depends on these unique features. Duckduck has its own search engine whereas Ixquick uses ten search engines and Startpage uses Google search engine. However, all of them help protect your privacy, IP address and personal information.