It was inevitable that someone would see a business opportunity by providing private search. Starting Page is a search engine that promises to keep your searches private, unlike Google, Bing, and others that build dossiers on what you search for. The search data is sold to third parties and is also used to target ads. I've written recently about how an hour of searching for camping items resulted in weeks of ads about camping stuff.
We are still in the Model T era of the Internet, with lots of evolution and innovation still to come. Starting Page is not the first search engine to challenge Google, and it won't be the last. But Internet time passes quickly, and if people decide they have had enough of Google, "enough is enough" will come quickly.
A few experiments with search phrases seems to deliver just a couple of pages of very relevant results, and those results are refreshingly free of link farms and "shopping" sites, which Google now seems to favor. That's my beef with the bigger search engines (Bing also favors link farms, although not quite to the extent of Google, in my experience). Most of these "make money on the Internet" schemes are focused on building sites on specialized topics that have a broad interest (e.g. "camping and hiking"), adding a thin veneer of content (frequently stolen from legitimate sites), and then larding up the site with ads and links to bigger shopping sites. In theory, you could make some money with this approach and provide some useful content, but most of the sites are rubbish. Nonetheless, since they are hawking ads, the search engines happily put them right at the top of the search results. What gets lost are the legitimate blogs and topical sites, which end up far down in the search results. So good luck to StartingPage; I hope it does well. We need it.