Startpage features a private, seamless, and fully functional browsing experience with their Anonymous View

Privacy feature

Without compromising on normal website functionality.

Startpage sought external technologies to enhance their website and found Surfly. After evaluating Surfly’s Interaction Middleware, they recognized it as the solution to their technical challenges. Surfly’s customizable technology transformed web requests and improved the website’s look, feel, and functionality without altering its original source code.

Startpage’s best feature is ‘anonymous view,’ which lets you view the web pages that pop up in your results through an online anonymous proxy. It’s a fast and easy way to stay anonymous while searching and viewing any page you like.

TechNadu

Leading tech reporter

Websites today are collecting a lot of different data on users. You may think it is only your IP address, but it is much more than that. Most websites collect information about your IP address, your browser, your device, and even your battery status.

For Startpage’s “anonymous view” feature, Surfly customized its Interaction Middleware technology to include several layers of protection that ensure that these user attributes always stay protected. Now, when a user clicks the “anonymous view” button from Startpage, the request is sent via Surfly’s proxy so that it appears to be coming from Surfly. This way, the user’s IP address stays hidden.

However, websites ask a host of other questions that, when matched up together, can still identify who you are. Thus, Surfly adds another privacy layer with certain techniques that clean, modify, or block web requests that track and reveal the identity of a user, subsequently ensuring that user attributes are never given away.

For instance, if a user attempts to view a website via Chrome, the output is modified to appear as if it is coming from another browser. If the website asks for a user’s battery status, Surfly just blocks it instead.

With these privacy-focused integrations, Startpage’s “anonymous view” has now become one of the most private ways to surf the web.

Challenge

Websites these days collect a ton of information about the user. They can identify your IP address, your browser, your device, and even your battery status.

Startpage, a privacy-focused search engine, had an Anonymous View feature that allowed users to view websites with complete anonymity, by just clicking a button on their search results page.

However, they were having issues with some websites not loading correctly, appearing “broken” to the end user, or not loading certain features and functionality. This stemmed from the many technical complexities of implementing a proxy service with an integrated privacy layer, and accounting for all the different ways a website is coded and developed.

Solution

For Startpage’s Anonymous View feature, Surfly partnered with their development team to customize its Interaction Middleware technology to include several layers of protection that with certain techniques that clean, modify, or block web requests that track and reveal the identity of a user.

With these privacy-focused integrations, Startpage’s Anonymous View has now become one of the most private ways to surf the web.

Results

Startpage was able to provide a private, seamless, and fully functional browsing experience for users that were using the Anonymous View button. Surfly’s powerful Interaction Middleware technology provided a robust solution that created anonymity on the fly without interfering with the user experience.