Unfortunately, Startpage is subjected to automated abuse and scraping on a daily basis, which can be very costly financially and in terms of system performance; a lot of that traffic originates on VPNs and TOR. Accordingly, we have strong anti-abuse measures in place, which we continually work hard to improve. In some instances, normal users will set off one of our rules and be asked to verify they are not a bot.

If you have been incorrectly blocked, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@startpage.com.

Thanks for trying Startpage. Ads are how we are able to provide a free private service. It might interest you to know that the team has been hard at work overhauling and improving the search experience. Among those improvements launching this month will be a reduced-ad experience on mobile.

From time to time, we do test the performance of our search results with extensions like the ones you mention and we haven’t found any major issues. In responding to your comment, we tested with several, including NoScript, and were able to pull up results just fine. With NoScript, the menus above the results disappeared, but that is to be expected unless you add us as a trusted domain. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at support@startpage.com.

Thanks for caring about privacy!