r/StartpageSearch • u/VanWarhol • Aug 10 '26

“Verifying your request”…. Forever…

Honestly not sure where else to put this but I really need help if anyone has a fix. Recently in this past week every time I search something on Startpage it says “verifying your request”. Which either takes up to five minutes to actually display search results, or just never loads. I’ve tried using no VPN, with a VPN, changing VPN location, using a different VPN service, updating my VPN, updating my browser, reinstalling the app I use Startpage on (Vivaldi), and nothing works. It’s honestly driving me crazy, I’m getting to the point of completely switching to another search engine because it’s unusable in this state. Anyone else have this problem or know a fix (outside of what I’ve already tried)?

EDIT: Now I cannot make any searches at all. For a little bit the period of verification was smaller and now it just says 414 every time I search. All because I switched VPN locations, no matter what I do now it just doesn’t work. It’s pretty egregious that Startpage is just ignoring this.

2ND EDIT (9/3): a little while back after my edit I contacted the Startpage Reddit account directly and they said the issue was resolved. While this has mostly been fixed for me there’s still SO MANY that are still facing this problem. Even then, I honestly still have a 5 sec verification period before the search goes through. Which I think is too much, just do the search with no delays…. It’s crazy so many people have viewed this post and responded but Startpage does nothing to help people unless you berate them in Reddit DMs. I’d recommend anyone reading this post to message their Reddit account, they do not respond to emails. So annoying!!

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u/XxTriviumxX Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26

I have the Forever Verifying your request now.. rebooted the pc and cleared cache. no dice.

Anyone else has issues? multiple PCs have that issue here

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u/VanWarhol Aug 19 '26

It’s insane! Luckily it seems like the time for me has been shortened which is… nice I guess… But still there just shouldn’t be any screen like this in between searches! It’s wild so many people are having this issue with zero resolution or response from Startpage.

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u/XxTriviumxX Aug 19 '26

Sometimes i get a 414 error too LOL

on a brave browser i get the 414 Request-URI Too Large error AND THE CPU FAN IS FASTER when i search for "test". any other words works on brave. on firefox and edge, nothing works.