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This article's presentation is pretty slick too….well laid out and very clear explanations. Nice.

Ah, interesting. I was under the impression StartPage did share your IP address; I'm glad to see I was wrong.

If Google has your IP address, it actually becomes surprisingly easy to identify you if you ever use Google directly for search. It's not hard to put two and two together; Google gleans information about you from your search habits, then connects the dots with your IP address. Machine learning systems are very good at connecting seemingly harmless and disparate bits of information into a surprisingly detailed whole.

Potentially interesting side note:
I thought I'd try out DuckDuckGo (since a Firefox add-on is available). When I tried to download/install it, Firefox advised that a search engine by the same name was already installed. When I checked my search engines, it didn't appear; but when I clicked the option to Restore Default Search Engines, miraculously it (and several others) showed up.
So I test-ran it, discovering that it at least trebled the amount of time to come up with the results, which at first merely showed another search bar in the window which required clicking on. It then spewed out a major whack of findings which were more slickly presented than Google would have done. Not too shabby.

DuckDuckGo's searches are powered by Yahoo, and StartPage's are powered by Google, so your results are presented in the default format of the ultimate search engine.

I haven't done much testing, but every time I've compared Google's search results with Yahoo's - same search term, of course - I've found that looking beyond Google's paid and otherwise highly placed results, I've been much happier with their results than with Yahoo's despite Yahoo's presentation being more user-friendly.

It was a long time between my last look at a Yahoo search results page and my post, and a correction is in order: Yahoo's results are presented in a much cleaner format than Google's, but DuckDuckGo's are still cleaner.

And DDG's partnership with Yahoo apparently doesn't limit the scope of its searches...

I wonder if that relates back to a question I posed here a coupl'a years ago, namely what happened to my Google pref cookie that remembered my search settings?

I only very recently discovered that search prefs have been moved "inside" Google, and you must be logged in for them to be effective.

Can you explain how that login benefits Google? As far as I can figure out, I've got my Google prefs set to not remember anything (although YouTube gets remembered, anyhow).

Thanks.