SearXNG vs Startpage vs DuckDuckGo vs Qwant

SearXNG vs Startpage vs DuckDuckGo vs Qwant: the short answer

SearXNG vs Startpage vs DuckDuckGo vs Qwant comes down to one question: who sees your search query, and from which IP address. The three hosted engines answer it the same way. Your query joins millions of others behind their servers, and the company running the engine is the one you have to trust. SearXNG answers it differently. There is no company. Your own server sends the query to Google and Bing, and the IP address they see is the address of your VPS (virtual private server).

That is the whole trade. A hosted engine hides you in a crowd and asks you to believe its privacy page. A SearXNG instance removes the company, but it puts one IP address, yours, in front of engines that treat a single busy address as a bot. If you run agents or Open WebUI, SearXNG wins. It also wins for a team that wants one shared search box with an API (application programming interface). If you are one person searching from a phone, a hosted engine wins. The rest of this comparison explains both halves.

What each engine does with your query

The four engines differ in two things a privacy page rarely makes obvious: where the results come from, and which IP address the upstream index sees. Everything below was read from each engine's own pages on 12 September 2026, and the DuckDuckGo, Qwant and SearXNG pages were read again on 25 October 2026, and Startpage's help pages on 27 October 2026, with the page date noted where one is printed. Where a page does not say something, the rows below leave it out.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a hosted engine run by a US company. Its results help page says that traditional links and images are results "which we largely source from Bing", and adds: "We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results." So the index is mostly Microsoft's, with DuckDuckGo's own crawler and its instant-answer sources layered on top. When you search, DuckDuckGo's servers query Bing. Bing sees DuckDuckGo's addresses, not yours.

Its privacy page (marked "Last updated 06-03-26" at the bottom) says: "We don't save your IP address alongside your searches, Duck.ai chats, or visits to our websites, and we never log IP addresses to disk that could be tied back to you." It also says "We have no way to create a history of your search queries, your chats, or the sites you browse." The money comes from ads: "Search ads on DuckDuckGo are based on the search results page you're viewing, and not based on you as a person." Ad clicks go through Microsoft: "Ad clicks are managed by Microsoft's ad network and Microsoft has committed to not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile and to not store or share that information other than for accounting purposes." That last line is a promise by Microsoft that DuckDuckGo relays, so the trust chain has two links.

Startpage

Startpage is a hosted engine operated by Surfboard Holding BV in The Hague, in the Netherlands. It has no index of its own. Its support page says "Startpage submits your query to Google and Bing anonymously on your behalf, then returns the results to you, privately." Bing is not a recent addition. Startpage's News Results help page, last edited on 20 July 2022, already said "News results are provided by Bing." The press release of 14 March 2023 widened that to other results: "Startpage is now incorporating Microsoft Bing search results and ads within some results pages". Google and Bing see Startpage's addresses, not yours. Ads are contextual, matched to the keyword you typed rather than to a profile, according to the company's help page read on 27 October 2026, which said "our ads are anonymously generated based on the search term you entered". The Anonymous View feature opens a result page through a Startpage proxy, so the site you visit sees Startpage's address as well. Startpage's help page puts it as "The website will only see the IP address of the Startpage server."

The ownership question is the one readers ask most, so here are the dated facts. Startpage is part of System1, a US advertising company. Startpage's own 2023 press release describes the company as "a part of System1, Inc. (NYSE:SST)". System1's investment came through Privacy One Group, a wholly owned subsidiary named in Startpage's own help center. In a help article dated November 2019, founder Robert Beens wrote that management and founders "continue to have an important stake in the company" and that covenants ensure "complete control over all privacy-related decisions remains with Startpage." Whether that reassures you is your call.

One honesty note. Startpage's pages could not be fetched by machine on 12 September 2026, on 10 October 2026, on 17 October 2026, or on 25 October 2026, because startpage.com refuses automated clients. On 27 October 2026 its help center and privacy policy were read through a text-only reader service, and the help-page quotes above come from that reading. The March 2023 press release was read on System1's investor relations site. On 29 October 2026 the privacy policy still could not be fetched, but its search-partner help page was accessible and said "We never record your visits, your searches, or your IP address". Open startpage.com/en/privacy-policy in a browser and read it yourself before you rely on any of this.

Qwant

Qwant is a hosted engine run from Paris. Its privacy pages read on 25 October 2026 (the French page printed "Mise à jour : 14/10/2026"; the English translation printed 20/08/2026) named the data controller as "Qwant, located at 42 avenue de la Porte de Clichy 75017, Paris". Their current replacements could not be fetched on 29 October 2026, so the policy details quoted below remain a record of that earlier reading. Since 2023 the company has been owned by Synfonium, a holding of OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba, with the French public bank Caisse des Dépôts as minority shareholder.

Of the three hosted engines, Qwant is the one building a general web index of its own. Its search page, read on 25 October 2026, says the Qwant Search interface "gives you access to the entire web", "thanks to our own indexing technology, designed to give you comprehensive, reliable and unprofiled search results." Neither that page nor the privacy page says how much of a given results page comes from that index. In November 2024 Qwant and Ecosia formed a joint venture, European Search Perspective, to build a European index called Staan. It began serving queries in August 2025, and a German rollout has since followed. Qwant's current terms also describe AI summaries using Staan results. Microsoft was still in the chain in the policy read on 25 October 2026: "we have a partnership with Microsoft for the provision of our search results and the provision of contextual advertisements".

What Qwant sent to Microsoft was listed on that page, and it was more detail than the other two hosted engines admitted to sending anywhere in the pages checked on 25 October 2026. The list included "The search keywords", "The first three bytes of your IP address" (the full IP address if you were signed in to a Qwant account), "The approximate geographic area from which the search originates, at the scale of a region or a city", and "The salted hash generated from your IP address, your User Agent and a salt changing at the latest every 3 months". The page added that "Qwant may also collect and transfer to this partner your full IP address" for security and reliability purposes such as spam and click-fraud detection. One sentence, "This data is transmitted to this partner within the European Union", sat under the heading "Measuring the effectiveness of certain contextual advertising results" and covered the time between an ad click and your return to the results page, not the list above. For the data it collected itself, Qwant kept a "salted hash of the IP address (with a salt changing at the latest every three months)" and said "The data is aggregated and retained by Qwant for 25 months". Read that as what it is: pseudonymised, which is a weaker word than anonymous. A truncated address plus a keyword is not a name, but it is not nothing.

SearXNG

SearXNG is not a hosted engine. It is free software that you run. It is the fork of searx that replaced the original, and it is the one still maintained. It has no index. Its documentation describes "a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from up to 261 search services" (the count on 25 October 2026; the number is generated from the engine list, so it drifts as engines are added or removed) and states "Users are neither tracked nor profiled." When you search, your instance sends the query to whichever engines you enabled, Google and Bing among them, with identifying data removed from each request, and merges what comes back.

There is no logging policy to cite, because there is no publisher. The project's own page on running a private instance puts it this way: "everything is in their control: the source code, logging settings and private data." That is true in both directions. Nothing is logged unless you log it, and nginx writes client IPs to its access log by default, so how safe SearXNG really is depends on the person who set it up, which is you.

The sentence in the docs that matters most is short: "The IP address used will be the IP of the instance". Google sees your VPS. Bing sees your VPS. If an instance is abused, the docs warn, the result is "external service to enforce CAPTCHAs or to ban the IP address". Nothing about that changes when the instance is private. You simply have fewer users producing the load.

The comparison, row by row

Index source

• DuckDuckGo: mostly Bing, plus its own crawler and instant-answer sources.
• Startpage: Google and Bing. Nothing of its own.
• Qwant: its own indexing technology and the Staan index it builds with Ecosia, plus search results supplied by Microsoft. Neither of its pages checked on 25 October 2026 gave the split.
• SearXNG: none. It queries the engines you enable and merges the answers.

Where it runs

• DuckDuckGo: servers operated by a US company. The privacy page does not name a hosting region.
• Startpage: a Dutch company in The Hague, part of the US advertising company System1.
• Qwant: a French company in Paris. Its policy read on 25 October 2026 said the ad click-timing data it shared with Microsoft was transmitted within the European Union, and did not say the same of the search data. Its current help center says technical data is hosted in Europe.
• SearXNG: your VPS, in whatever country you rented it.

Logging, as published on 12 September 2026

• DuckDuckGo: "we never log IP addresses to disk that could be tied back to you".
• Startpage: its search-partner help page, checked again on 29 October 2026, says "We never record your visits, your searches, or your IP address".
• Qwant: in the policy last confirmed on 25 October 2026, a salted hash of the IP, aggregated and kept for 25 months, plus a truncated IP with keywords sent to Microsoft, and the full IP for account users or for security checks.
• SearXNG: whatever you configure. No policy exists until you write one.

Cost

• DuckDuckGo: free. Funded by keyword ads served through Microsoft and by a paid subscription.
• Startpage: free. Funded by keyword ads and an optional Ad-Free subscription, available in select regions and requiring an account.
• Qwant: free. Funded by contextual ads supplied by Microsoft.
• SearXNG: the software is free. You pay for a VPS and for your own time.

What breaks

• DuckDuckGo: results depend on Bing.
• Startpage: results depend on Google and Microsoft Bing, which has supplied its news results since at least July 2022 and some web results and ads since March 2023. Trust depends on how you read the System1 ownership.
• Qwant: its own indexing reduces reliance on Microsoft, but Microsoft remains a results supplier in the policy last confirmed on 25 October 2026.
• SearXNG: rate limits and CAPTCHAs against your one IP address, plus the upkeep of a server.

The honest trade: a crowd, or your own IP

A hosted engine puts millions of queries behind a handful of addresses. Google and Bing already know those addresses belong to DuckDuckGo or Startpage, and the volume is expected, and in Startpage's case paid for. Your query is one of millions. The engine could log you. The upstream index cannot single you out.

A SearXNG instance inverts this. Your VPS is one address with no contract behind it, and it sends requests that look like a browser but arrive at a rate no human types. The upstream engine reads that pattern as automation. What happens next is an HTTP 429 (too many requests) or a CAPTCHA (a challenge page a human must solve) in place of results. Some engines send a 403 (forbidden) instead. SearXNG sees the error and suspends that engine for a fixed time, so the instance stops making things worse. The default suspension times in settings.yml, stored there in seconds, show how seriously the project takes each kind of failure.

[
  {
    "label": "Too many requests (HTTP 429)",
    "minutes": 3
  },
  {
    "label": "Access denied (HTTP 402 or 403)",
    "minutes": 3
  },
  {
    "label": "CAPTCHA, generic",
    "minutes": 60
  },
  {
    "label": "reCAPTCHA, specific HTTP 503 detector",
    "minutes": 10080
  },
  {
    "label": "Cloudflare CAPTCHA",
    "minutes": 21600
  }
]

A 429 costs you 3 minutes of that engine, and a 403 costs the same. A generic CAPTCHA costs 60 minutes, which is an hour. The week-long reCAPTCHA suspension of 10080 minutes applies only when the HTTP error detector matches resp.status_code == 503 and '"https://www.google.com/recaptcha/' in resp.text. Google CAPTCHA redirects detected by the Google engine raise the generic CAPTCHA exception, whose current default suspension is 60 minutes, which is an hour. A detected Cloudflare CAPTCHA costs 21600 minutes, which is fifteen days. These are the values in the repository's current settings.yml, checked on 29 October 2026. On 25 October 2026 the search settings page in the SearXNG documentation still printed the older values of a day for a 403 or a generic CAPTCHA, and an hour for a 429, so if the two disagree, check the effective settings your instance loads. During the suspension the HTML page lists the engine in its error box with the text "CAPTCHA" or "too many requests" (or "access denied" for a 403), and the JSON API lists it under unresponsive_engines. Results still arrive from the engines that are not suspended, which is why an instance with only Google enabled feels broken and an instance with six engines feels fine.

If this is where you are right now, two sibling posts hold the fixes: why SearXNG returns 429 errors and what the limiter and outgoing settings change, and what to do when Google answers your instance with a CAPTCHA. The short version: fewer requests per engine, more engines, sane timeouts, and a limiter in front of any instance other people can reach.

The trade in one line. A hosted engine asks you to trust a company with your query and gives you a shared address in return. SearXNG asks you to trust nobody and gives you a single address that stands alone in return.

When self-hosting SearXNG wins

You need a JSON API. The three hosted engines deliver results to humans in a browser. SearXNG has a JSON endpoint, and it is off by default. Enable it in settings.yml:

search:
  formats:
    - html
    - json

Then check it from any machine:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' 'https://search.example.com/search?q=wireguard+mtu&format=json'

200 means JSON is on. 403 means json is missing from search.formats, because the request handler calls flask.abort(403) for any format not in that list. With it enabled, one call returns the merged results:

curl -s 'https://search.example.com/search?q=wireguard+mtu&format=json' | jq '.results[:3][] | {title, url, engine}'

Each result carries title, url, content and the engine it came from. The response also holds answers, suggestions, infoboxes and unresponsive_engines. That endpoint is what Open WebUI's web search and coding agents with a browser-search skill call.

You want no ads and no partner. Every hosted engine on this page pays its bills with ads, and two of the three route those ads through Microsoft. Startpage also offers a paid Ad-Free subscription in select regions. SearXNG serves no ads and has no ad partner. The docs state it as a design goal: "SearXNG does not serve ads or tracking content, unlike most search services."

You want to mix engines. A hosted engine gives you one index, or two. SearXNG lets you query Google, Bing, Brave, Wikipedia and a documentation site in one request and rank the union. For technical searches this is the feature people stay for. The same query against several indexes surfaces the page that only one of them ranks well.

You are a team. One instance shared by ten people is closer to a hosted engine than a personal one is. Ten people's queries hide each other a little, and one person owns the config for all of them. That instance needs a limiter and a reverse proxy done properly, which is the hardening a shared SearXNG instance needs before anyone outside your house can reach it.

When a hosted engine wins

One person, one phone. Your instance is one address that searches for exactly one human, so the crowd you hide in has one person in it. Google cannot put a name on that address, but a stream of queries from an address that never changes is a profile whether or not a name is attached. A hosted engine's shared address does more for a single user than a private VPS does.

The second reason is upkeep. A phone on a mobile network reaches a hosted engine in the time it takes to load the page. It reaches your VPS through whatever you put in front of it: a domain, a TLS (transport layer security) certificate, a reverse proxy, and a limiter that must not block your own phone. When SearXNG suspends its Google engine after a CAPTCHA, you are the one who notices, and you are the one who fixes it. For a single person, that is real work for a benefit the crowd already gives you.

The third reason is the phone itself. A hosted engine ships an app and a browser integration that set it as the default search. Your instance can be set as a custom search engine in Firefox and in most Android browsers, and it works, but every new device is a manual step. If that sounds like a chore, it is, and it is a fair reason to pick DuckDuckGo or Startpage and move on.

How to read a privacy page without being fooled

The four pages above use different words for similar things, and the differences matter. Four checks catch most of it.

• Find the printed date. A page with no date can change under you with no record. DuckDuckGo and Qwant print one. Copy the date into your own notes when you decide to trust a page.
• Search the page for the word "partner". A partner is a second company that sees something. DuckDuckGo names Microsoft for ads. Qwant named Microsoft for results and ads in the policy last confirmed on 25 October 2026. What the partner receives is the sentence to read twice.
• Look for a retention period. "We don't log" is a claim with no number. "Retained for 25 months" is a claim you can check against. Qwant was the only one of the three that printed a number in the policies checked on 25 October 2026, and that transparency counts for Qwant even though the number is long.
• Read "alongside" carefully. "We don't save your IP address alongside your searches" is a precise sentence. It says the two are not stored together. It does not say the address is never seen, and it does not say the query is never stored. That is the sentence DuckDuckGo chose, and it is honest, so read it as written.

None of this makes any of the four engines a bad choice. It makes the choice yours, on facts you checked on a date you wrote down, which is the only kind of privacy decision that lasts.

Where to go next

If SearXNG is the right answer for you, the install is a Docker Compose file and a settings.yml behind a reverse proxy, and the SearXNG self-hosting guide walks through all of it, including the limiter that keeps your address off the block lists. If what you wanted all along was a search engine over your own material rather than a private front for Google, Hister, a personal search engine you host yourself is a different tool for a different problem, and its own guide covers it.

FAQ

Is SearXNG more private than DuckDuckGo?

It removes a different risk. DuckDuckGo asks you to trust one company's privacy page, and that page says it never logs IP addresses to disk in a way that could be tied to you. SearXNG asks you to trust nobody, because the software runs on your server, but the engines it queries see your VPS address on every request. For one person, DuckDuckGo's shared address hides you better. For an agent or a team that needs a JSON API, SearXNG provides an endpoint you control.

Does Startpage still use Google results?

Yes. Startpage's support page says it submits your query to Google and Bing anonymously on your behalf. Bing has supplied its news results since at least July 2022, and a Startpage press release from 14 March 2023 announced that it was incorporating Microsoft Bing search results and ads within some results pages. Startpage has no index of its own. Its results are proxied Google and Bing results served by a Dutch company that is part of the US advertising company System1.

Why does my SearXNG instance keep getting CAPTCHAs from Google?

Because every query leaves from one IP address, your VPS, at a rate that looks automated. Google answers with a CAPTCHA page instead of results, and SearXNG then suspends its Google engine for the time set in settings.yml. Google CAPTCHA redirects detected by the Google engine use the generic default of 60 minutes, which is an hour. The 10080 minute suspension, a week, applies only to the HTTP error detector's match for status 503 with "https://www.google.com/recaptcha/ in the response body. Enable more engines so results keep flowing, and lower the request rate per engine. Put the limiter in front of any instance other people can reach before you change anything else.

Which of these search engines has its own index?

Two of them, at least in part. DuckDuckGo runs its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, but says its links and images are largely sourced from Bing. Qwant says its own indexing technology gives access to the entire web, and it builds the Staan index with Ecosia, but its privacy page last confirmed on 25 October 2026 still named Microsoft as a supplier of its search results and did not say how the two were split. Startpage has no index and proxies Google and Bing. SearXNG has no index by design and queries whichever engines you enable.

Can I call DuckDuckGo or Startpage from a script or an AI agent?

A web results API for individuals could not be confirmed in either service's documentation on 29 October 2026. SearXNG exposes a JSON endpoint at /search?q=...&format=json once json is listed under search.formats, and that endpoint is what Open WebUI and agent search tools expect.