Some people are going to ask "How does Startpage make its money?" and fortunately they've put that info in their Privacy Policy:

  Our search result pages may include a small number of 
  clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue
  and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved
  from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable
  the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system
  information is shared, but because we never share personal
  information or information that could uniquely identify 
  you, the ads we display are not connected to any 
  individual user."

For those on mobile:

> Our search result pages may include a small number of clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system information is shared, but because we never share personal information or information that could uniquely identify you, the ads we display are not connected to any individual user."

this always seemed like the right kind of trade-off - the sponsored links are generated from the search terms, not the 'personalised' search_terms+surveilled_data blob. if this is _all_ that Google the search engine did, I probably wouldn't have switched.