Startpage supposedly doesn't generate unique URLs for search results, so how did this poster get one into a Tweet?

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Earlier today I saw a Startpage ‘search results’ URL in a tweet. I clicked on it and was surprised to find that it actually pulled up unique ‘search results’ from an apparent ‘generic’ URL.

Turned out the poster uses Brave but didn’t seem to have done anything to get Startpage to generate unique URLs. Even more odd, Startpage support claims that it intentionally hides the URLs for search results. Unfortunately for my purposes, that also means they can’t be bookmarked or otherwise preserved.

What would explain this person’s ability to get unique URL’s from search results (&/or my inability to do the same)?

NOTE: Tweets don’t show the entire string of a URL. What displays in his tweet is:

startpage.com/do/dsearch?que…

which, when copied, Twitter converts to:

https://t.co/ilK2juck6t?amp=1

The URL I always get from all search results is:
startpage.com/sp/search

I can confirm that no data is hidden or embedded in the URLs I get – i.e., if I copy & paste them into a new tab (in any kind of window), all I get is the Startpage home page.

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If you add startpage to the list of Brave search engines by following the instructions here (so you should now have 2 entries for startpage):

https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/1164/2/search-strings-or-adding-startpage-as-a-search-option-in-unsupported-browsers

Then set this new entry as the default search engine, it will create unique URLs as shown in your example above.

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@Scriber Thanks! You know how to do something that Startpage’s own support staff apparently doesn’t. (They never mentioned it.)

There are a few caveats to this newfound success:

• Unique URL’s only display when searches are conducted from the URL line – i.e., if a Startpage (“SP”) screen is currently displayed, entering the search spec in SP’s search box doesn’t return a unique URL for the search results.

• An SP tab isn’t uniquely identified in the ‘Window’ and ‘Tab’ dropdown menus (on a Mac) either.

• There’s also no distinguishing information that identifies the search results in one SP tab from those in a different tab. Every SP tab looks the same, and cursoring over the tab (in the tab bar) with the mouse pointer shows no identifying information as it does, e.g., with DuckDuckGo.

• In TOR (Private TOR tab/window) the user’s selected default search engine isn’t recognized. TOR instead defaults it to Google or possibly to another search engine depending on where TOR thinks you’re located – like Qwant if it thinks you’re in France. That’s a separate issue that’s already been raised here.

Still, having any kind of unique search results from SP is a welcome surprise, as is the fact that they can now be bookmarked, whereas before there was no point in bookmarking them because every bookmark just brought up the SP home page.

Cheers.

(BTW, Brave wasn’t identified as ‘not supported’ in my comms with SP so I don’t know whether it is or isn’t. No one said specifically that it isn’t.)

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