July 23, 2020

Startpage’s Most Requested Feature is Here: The Region Filter

Introducing Startpage’s filter feature to help users receive regional results while protecting their privacy

As a company with users worldwide, we’re aware of the limits of internet products and services. Often, most internet products and services cater to an English and USA based user-base, neglecting users in the EU, Latin America, Asia, and other regions.

With our new region filter feature, we’re showing our commitment to providing quality results and intuitive user experience for our users worldwide. If you’re in a non-English speaking country or a country with multiple languages, you can have quality results relevant to your country. Additionally, the filter feature will help users using VPNs or traveling receive region-specific results while keeping their location private.

Why the Filter Feature is Important to Data Protection

Have you ever searched for “restaurants with delivery” and received results not relevant to your region?

When you use a non-private search engine, this may not be an issue because the search engine is constantly collecting your personal data – including location, previously visited websites, and your online purchases. It knows all your favorite restaurants, how often you visit them, and even your usual order. Creepy, right? In terms of privacy protection, allowing Big Tech to collect this type of personal data for the sake of convenience can be dangerous.

A private search engine, like Startpage, doesn’t collect or store your personal data. It doesn’t know anything about you – where you are or what websites you previously visited! Therefore, you get results solely based on your search query and the results are the same results anyone around the world would get.

Up until now, Startpage users have been able to customize search settings by:

Search Interface Language: From Dansk (Danish) to Español (Spanish) and Svenska (Swedish), you can set your interface to any of 10 world languages.
Search Language: You can view search results in a number of languages. Changing the search language—for example, from English to Italiano—will lead to more useful search results in Italian, especially if you live in Italy.

However, we still received plenty of user feedback requesting a feature that would give regional results without sacrificing privacy:

“It’d be nice if SP can have the option to change and save the desired search region instead of being forced to use the search region based on the location of the IP/user.”

Thus, our product team and UX team collaborated on improving the overall user experience by incorporating a region filter into Startpage search.

Our UX lead Petko Mishev shared:

“Each search query is a question needing a specific answer, usually on a moment’s click. To achieve the best user experience we worked closely with our amazing Support team to understand how we could give our users the possibility to make Startpage their own personal “answer engine,” without trading their privacy for it. The region filter feature is only our first step towards this goal!”

How to use Startpage’s Region Filter Feature

On the result page, you’ll find the Region Filter feature under the search bar, in between “Any time” and the “Family filter.” You can select All Regions or select a specific region. You can also set your region preference in our Setting page under “Filter search results from this region.”