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Germany’s equivalent to America’s Consumer Reports has awarded Startpage.com top honors in a battle to determine the best search engine. The world’s most private search engine beat out eight competitors, including Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo for the win.
“We’re honored to achieve first place in this test,” said Startpage.com CEO Robert Beens. “It shows that private search has come a long way and that it’s not necessary to track people to attain award-winning service and profitability.”
Startpage.com offers Google search results in privacy. No personal information is logged, sold, or shared. In addition, Startpage also offers its new Anonymous View proxy allowing users to visit the web pages they find anonymously. These features, combined with great search results and a crystal-clear privacy policy, helped the company edge out competitors for the top spot.
Privacy experts tell Arutz Sheva that Startpage.com’s newly redesigned features like Anonymous View make it “a game changer”.
Testing involved comparing 50 search queries that in some cases included typos, vague descriptions, and other ambiguities. Then the relevance of the first six search results was evaluated. The quality of the results were then reviewed in light of other search engine features and policies.
Stiftung Warentest, like Consumer Reports, is known for its unbiased assessment of consumer goods and services. It was founded by the German government as an independent foundation and remains impartial by funding its work through sales of its magazine, books and other publications. It also receives funding from the German government in exchange for not running advertising, which might otherwise influence its independence.