Startpage, the world’s most private search engine, features a private, seamless, and fully functional browsing experience with their Anonymous View

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.

Story:

Startpage looked for various external technologies to integrate within their website and in the end, found Surfly. After reviewing Surfly’s powerful Interaction Middleware technology, they knew that they had finally found a solution that could solve their technical challenges and provide the exceptional user experience they were striving for.

Surfly solved their problem through our customizable Interaction Middleware technology that can transform any web request and change the look, feel, or functionality of any website, portal, or digital application, without the need to modify the website’s original source code.

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.