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Search Engine Suspended My Service

D

devnull

AK Subscriber
Subscriber
I use the Startpage search engine, have for several years now. It does fairly well with whatever I need, although for tech stuff it's still better to go to Google as they're just better at finding what I need if it's something obscure.

The reason for using Startpage involves them not selling your search engine history to data brokers. At least they weren't, dunno, haven't checked in a while.

Today I was greeted with the message below when searching for something.

Your connection has been suspended.

We're sorry for the inconvenience! Our system has detected the type of high-volume traffic coming from your internet connection that is normally associated with bots and scrapers.

VPN users can often resolve this issue by connecting through a different server. If you are using Tor, try connecting through a different exit node.

If you find that you are continously blocked, submit the CAPTCHA below so our support team can verify your connection to Startpage.

Please consider providing the following information, which will help us better assist you and fine tune our anti-abuse systems
Click to expand...

I haven't seen this from Startpage previously. In the past I have seen a large number of captcha challenges from the CDN (Content Delivery Network) Cloudflare, which hosts a lot of big web services/sites, although I haven't seen that recently. Much of that was when I was running a web proxy in AWS and routing my web activity through it. Seems lots of bad actors have used AWS for nefarious activity, so I had to abandon that service for hosting my web proxy.

And I do not generate a high volume of traffic through Startpage. I might have run maybe 5-10 searches over the last 24 hours.

I've written about some of the things I do to protect my privacy and network in general. These various service providers will label you as a bot if your network traffic exhibits certain characteristics. Presently I'm not even using a web proxy or a VPN. I generally use a web proxy in front of the VPN to block known bad traffic.

I suppose it's a good thing they can't tell the difference between me and a bot or a scraper. If I get more aggressive in controlling what travels to/from my network, I see lots of captcha challenges. It's a bit of work to stop the bad stuff while maintaining functionality - but then again that's my job.
 
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DesertRatt said:
When machines take over decision making....
Click to expand...
Oh, we've been heading in that direction for years. It's just accelerating now.

I see you're getting beat up in that thread you opened about the tracking device in your car. I'm with you on that one. If someone doesn't care if they're being tracked, that's fine, but for some reason they seem to think that means that no one should. Then they start the ad hominem attacks.
bruno80918 said:
I have been using duck duck go for a long time.
no tracking, and a good search engine.
Click to expand...
I do use it occasionally, and it seems to be a reasonably good search engine. Still, for searches for technical information (at least in my case, that is) I just haven't found anything better than Google
w1jim said:
Can you access it through a VPN?
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I'm sure I can, although I just checked and remembered I was in the middle of setting up the policies I use on the proxy server - and it's broken in a way of which it's blocking everything. . I use EasyList as a source for blocking policies. The lists are long, and it takes some effort to get it right.

Actually, I filled out the form that came up when Startpage presented with the block notification and I have access again, although I get the feeling that they were just looking for the captcha to be properly authenticated as it was instantaneous.

Here's an example of what web traffic looks like when you open Firefox.

These are the logs on the web proxy I use (IP address changed to protect the innocent). It's blocking everything, but I'm trying to illustrate the conventional traffic you'd see from a browser - and this is even before I try to open a web page. My home page on the browser is a blank tab.

It's phoning home. I knew of the detectportal traffic previously, but that Cloudflare DNS stuff I don't recall seeing in the past.

That could very well be what the various services are looking for (or something similar) when they analyze traffic from someone browsing the internet. If they don't see it, you'll be suspected as being a bot. I'm just theorizing on that, but that makes a lot more sense than the 'large volume of traffic' BS that Startpage presented in their block notification.

1704556726.326 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 3975 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.326 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 3975 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.492 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 3975 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.814 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 3975 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.815 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4170 GET http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.829 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4170 GET http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.833 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4170 GET http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.847 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4170 GET http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.855 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4015 CONNECT contile.services.mozilla.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.867 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4170 GET http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.899 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4170 GET http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.982 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4036 CONNECT content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.996 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4009 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556726.996 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4009 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556727.011 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4009 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556727.011 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4009 CONNECT mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
1704556727.120 0 1.2.3.4 TCP_DENIED/403 4006 CONNECT push.services.mozilla.com:443 - HIER_NONE/- text/html
Click to expand...
 
I actually started using Startpage from time to time when I would get messages from Google that I had to identify myself. Yeah the tracking is getting out of control these days. Just surprised that it showed up on Startpage.
 
Startpage has changed ownership as I understand it, and I've decided to stop using it. DuckDuckGo is what I'm using now, but it seems like just about any of the major search engines are tied to selling you something as opposed to providing results for what you're attempting to find. It's very difficult to find good results for tech queries.

I'll try a few paid search engines, the two in my notes are SearXNG and Kagi.
 
I was using startpage, but had issues where it would take ages to load results after doing whatever checks...or while doing them. Dunno

Mojeek for now, ddg, and UDM14 when I must.
 
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