Startpage was acquired by targeted ad company System1 in December 2018 (but neither company announced the acquisition until November 2019, for some reason).
All true points, but I'd rather risk being tracked by a company that would be completely cratered even more than they've already been by being bought by Privacy One than just go straight to the devil himself, so I use the !s and just mentally treat it as if its a slightly better form of !g rather than before where startpage was all the benefits of Google search without most of the drawbacks.
https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...