When you click directly on a search result, you leave the protection of Startpage. Direct connection with the third party website is established. The website can see and record your IP address, place cookies on your browser, and possibly read cookies placed there by others. The website can observe and record your behavior, including links you click on and pages you view. On the upside, pages load more quickly, since you are displaying content directly from its source. The "no-proxy" option makes sense when you are not concerned about privacy, when you trust the website, or when you want to be identified, like when you log into your bank account.

Startpage goes to the website you select, retrieves the page, and displays it for you. You are invisible to the website. They see only Startpage's IP address, not yours. Since you never make direct contact with the website, they can't see or store cookies on your browser. You can click on linked pages from the website and the Startpage proxy will display those for you too. While using the proxy, you are protected at all times by Startpage's outstanding privacy policy. (No IP address recorded, no identifying cookies used, no search or browsing activity stored.) The Startpage Proxy Service offers complete privacy and anonymity. The downside is that pages load more slowly, since Startpage must retrieve the contents and redisplay them.