Slashdot Mirror
TopClick Touts Private Searching
EasyTarget writes, "TopClick aims to be a search engine that is very privacy respecting, no cookies, banner ads or other data harvesting. It uses a common protocol to the Google search engine that prevents session tracking or user identification. Is this the start of mainstream companies that view strong privacy as a 'product' in itself?"
This is how Direct Hit works...
You are wrong. The best in privacy is to come. Imagine a company that can make its bread and butter from a system that can guarantee your privacy while you are surfing... And that's not smoke nor vaporware.
though not top click, it can find topclick!
http://www.topclick.com/search.html?Q=topclick
This is a company. They must be earning money from somewhere. Does it say anywhere on the site?
They are also serving directory information with search results. Try searching for Linux. It puts suse and redhat in the Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Linux/Distrib utions category, etc.
Very nice!
Ooops, I linked to dmoz, here is Google's Recreation/Travel/Transportation/Air_Travel/Airlin es category
If its the same database, why would I use them when I can get the same results with google? Why Why Why..
After quitting, I remembered how after straying over that line that separates smokers from people who bum the odd cigarette while in bars, I quickly became accustomed to view my sick addiction as something normal, and how consequently I too subjected people around me, both friends and strangers to the disgustingly offensive effects of my nicotine habit. Just like the people i hated before.
And once i kicked, I learned to be deeply fucking ashamed of myself in a way I was simply unable to understand for the five years I was an addict. Once you get clean your perception of the act and its effect on others around you will completely change. I don't say that to guilt people into quitting, I'm just saying that after you quit for whatever selfish or altruistic reason you do decide to quit, your gonna go WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING ???
You are not indulging a harmless vice with no consequences for anyone but yourself. Addicts to tobacco cost this country--and any others with any socially consciencious medical systems--vast sums of money and all the lost opportunities that could have been purchased with those billions that go to treat the end-effects of your "pause that refreshes". That's just a statistic; of course the real damage is done to people around you, people who care about you, and worst of all, young people around you who see what you do and add it to their worldview as part of "the normal".
Do you smoke? Don't you wish other people would quit before the point where they've permanently damaged their health? (instead of after, which seems to be the way..)
NEWS FLASH In a recent slashdot article on sleep deprivation, many posters remembered the radio DJ Peter Tripp who once stayed up for 201 hours straight. It was announced today on Howard Stern that he has died, and I would say that it was the doing of the clown. This is sad for us all, staying awake did not help poor Mr. Tripp in his endeavor to avoid being eaten by the clown.
y3ah, 1'v3 0wn3d that s3arc# 3ng1n3 a d0z3n t1m35 n0w.
J3551ca 51mp50n nak3d and p3tr1f13d! Y3ah!
--trollbastard
this thread is huge
This is the corporate ethos today. Only time will tell if they can be trusted. I could care less what they proclaim themselves to be.
If you check out their Affiliate page (doesn't Amazon (that link is to noamazon.com, by the way (I just love parentheses)) have a patent on that?) then you'd see that the did license Google's search technology.
Topclick seams to be google without the page cash.
Have you seen googles new directory
at directory.google.com
I am working on a new consept at aeiwi.com
is a hybrid between a web dirctory and a saerch engine,
I call it a web filter.
Knud
It nice and fast, but it's not what altavista
used to be as far as searching. Remember how
easy and fast it was to search news groups
in the old altavista? Are there any sites like
that now? I just want one place to search everything, without the bulkyness and dumbing down of some sites!!!
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Google may, or may not use banners (I honestly don't know, I normally run under webwasher so I wont see them anyway. But the Google factsheet certainly leaves the option open (see the 2nd paragraph in the 'Business Model' section).
EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
This is what they said about /. www.slashdot.org is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21 on Linux
I'm running ZoneAlarm personal firewall from www.zonelabs.com and if I attempt to make a search I get an error like this:
ZoneAlarm has blocked an incoming request to your computer. This could indicate that an unauthorized party is trying to gain access to it, or obtain information about your network.
Information Received:
Name Packet sent from 204.71.176.40 (TCP Port 5900) to -.-.-.-
(TCP Port 46944) was blocked
Status Dropped
Source IP Address 204.71.176.40
Destination IP Address -.-.-.-
Source Port 5900
Destination Port 46944
Link Layer Protocol 1
Network Layer Protocol 1
Transport Layer Protocol 2
Count 1
Status Code 100002
Lock Level 0
Security Information 0,1,0,2
Operating System Windows NT-5.0.2195--SP (flames, save 'em)
Product ZoneAlarm
ProductVersion 2.0.26
Language 0809
State Find Code 13
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Man, I wish more companies would do this. I would happily switch banks to one that doesn't sell my name and address to every junk mail shop and phone solicitor on the planet. My privacy is something that, in a perfect world, would be respected by default, but here in the real world, I would gladly pay a premium for that respect. I think this is a real untapped market. I'd love for it to catch on both on the web and in the brick and mortar world.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Yes. I ran a couple of test searches through it. Even with the Slashdot Effect hitting it, it was returning searches at least as fast as the other search engines. I even tried some odd ones that it would not be likely to have cached. I'll certainly be bookmarking them. Of course their privacy policy is excellent. They put a link right on the main page to it. Go read it. It'll bring a tear of joy to your eye.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
That's my point, if Topclick is receiving my search terms, sending them to google, getting the results and displaying them to me, they have the opportunity to analyze and record the HREF's vs the Search strings and all that data without too much difficulty. When you do a search on topclick it returns results from google with the topclick banner on the top of the page - so it is filtering the results that are returned.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
They have a specific product (presumably privacy related I assume) that they will be announcing shortly. I don't know anything more than that, but the search service is an inducement to use their site but its not their main product.
Mind you I support the idea of perserving internet anonymity whereever possible. Plus its nice to see a large scale and promising site use PHP!
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I don't know anything about the SEC filing, but if they are running software to ensure that all searches are relayed through their server before being submitted to Google, and then routed back to the user - ie proxying the search so to speak - then it would be a relatively small matter to record the search strings being relayed in a database and index them to determine which are most commonly used.
Since the site is apparently running PHP amongst other things, this could be little more than an elaborate PHP script and a Mysql database. I could figure out something comparable with no more than a few hours to experiment.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I don't use Google because it doesn't seem to be as advanced or as fast as others.
Foo', who cares about fancy graphics? Google sorts sites by the number of links they to other sites that match your search. This cuts down the search results because pages are already listed in other pages.
I gave up on Altavista when the same damn site was linked down all the way down the list.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Right, except for doubleclick which can get it's fingers into a whole bunch of your cookies and then (for the finale) attach your use across several sites to your name. Completely harmless, though.
You can choose which sites can set cookies, e.g. Slashdot. Some sites like mail.com do require cookies to be set to function. This can be subverted by allowing the cookie to be set but not stored, by making the cookie file read only.
THere's an informative chapter on User Tracking at the Web Tools Review. Have a gander at Erik Rossen's advice in the Reader's Comments section at the article's end.
raw cod annoy sumo
Zero Knowledge Systems sell Freedom. Have a look at the FAQ. Has anyone here used this product? What are your impressions?
raw cod annoy sumo
Cookies do not gather data on you. A cookie can be read by a site only if that specific site has set the cookie in the first place. The worst a cookie could do is track what you do ON THEIR SITE. Things that people attribute to cookies like tracking your movement on the web are not the function of cookies, that is something that is included in the HTTP header. I've never understood why people insist that cookies violate your privacy... at the very worst, they notice that you go to the "Hard drives" section of THEIR OWN SITE more often than other places... so what? Its not like they can tell you just came from Jack's Booty Shack from them, that's the job of the HTTP headers.
Esperandi
it would be a relatively small matter to record the search strings
Yes, of course, for search strings. I was (and the original author was) talking about links, as in A HREF tags. You can't track those without a redirector
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
*will* be tracking the number of clicks made on each URL in the database
Well, unless someone else here can prove me wrong, they can't actually tell how many times people clicked on an link. The only way to do it is to redirect the URL through a CGI script, and they aren't doing that yet. If there is another way, please let me know!
Besides, the SEC filing mentions nothing about tracking clicks -- the company seems more concerned about getting people to come to the site and buy products through an affiliate network.
This seems like a really weak company to me -- they at least have to find a way to make enough money to pay Google and for bandwidth, otherwise they are going under mighty fast.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
I searched for "Stuff" as my x-th search on Google, just to see what search results look like. The results were quite interesting.
Have you spent much time using Google? In my book it blows all others including metacrawler hands down because it usually returns relevent sites first and the little bit of text below the link shows you the occurrance of your search words in that web link. If google fails then I like your two favorites and northernlight as secondary searches. All in all Google has saved me countless hours trying to find the relevent sites in my searches and now I may switch to topclick.
no sig.
Topclick is made out of people!!! Its peooppllle!! Really though.. I could understand if a site got bought out by a company, but isn't it a little misleading to like oh... blatantly trick internet users into buying books by playing switcheroo after they start hitting the site? Some people want to help old ladies across the street. Some people want to charge them for crossing. Whatever this world was coming to its already got there and then stagnated.
You can find the inside scoop through the company's SEC filing. They are planning to generate revenue through their "virtual bookstore". They're just an Amazon affiliate.
Looks like a pretty weak business model to me...
NetCraft will tell you that the unix is linux.
AltaVista is fast and has great boolean syntax.
Metacrawler searches everything, so when i can't find something on altavista, I use it.
But google based? Couldn't they make it a metasearch engine?
--
Hrmm. As long as THESE people are trustworthy.
Eh...
~agent 00ravyn_ ___
________________________________________
___
I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.
Yup - definitely a dmoz mirror BUT it also includes the google features like how linked to the stuff is. Now all they have to do is remove dmoz cats from the database (seriously - see the last link on http://www.google.com/search?q=trans 4mation&cat=).
:)
Now how often do they update?
(sorry, dmoz inside joke)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%E5%8D%8D&bt
Well, he is just suggesting a nice alternative. But I still don't think the article deserves the front page.
Furthermore, "TopClick" is missing a lot of the Google features, such as 'Cached' links, 'GoogleScout', and the Google Open Directory which was just added yesterday (a much improved Open Directory, why hasn't there ben a story yet??).
Obviously you haven't tracked *large* projects across the PHP 4.0 betas. The fact of the matter is that as much as PHP is a very nice language, it's also a very... quirky language. The codebase I work on is about 500k of PHP and much of it has a tendency to break with revisions, updates, and occasionally the phase of the moon.
----------------------------
as far as I can tell, its like a mirror of dmoz.org
does anyone have anymore scoop on this?
kfort
There's nothing wrong with using 1.3.12/PHP 4.0b4.1 - indeed, I'd say that that would probably offer a lot of advantages, in terms of performance, stability and security.
I hope they're using a recent kernel (for whatever OS they're running under, I've not looked).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Looks very nice. But they also look like a corporation. Yet they have no discernible source of revenue. Free service, no ads, no customer database to sell, no technology to license (they got their techonology from google). What's the catch here? Maybe get everyone hooked then start charging to use the site? I'm stumped.
[Now that that I got you in with the doom and gloom title, I will spew-forth-my-idea's]
A privacy respecting business on the Internet are doomed to fail. Why? Because the people who have the choice to make a privacy respecting business are the businesses themselves. Why would any business that wants to make money give up information or prevent itself from gathering information on its customers that would make it a better business? If a business could gather all the info it wanted on you, it would. Why? So it could make|sell a product|service that you want|need.
Personally, I think it is unethical that businesses try and do gather all the information on as they can, but businesses are out to make money, not be ethical.
One man's view (Skew'ed, but mine).
Linux O Muerte!
-rpl
TopClick International, Inc. (a development stage company), "the Company", was incorporated on October 3, 1996 as Galverton Oil & Gas, Inc. [...] Effective July 8, 1998, the Company had a change of control, and the nature of the business is changed from development of oil and gas properties to the business of operating an Internet Website.
- (Formerly Galveston Oil & Gas, Inc)
- The statement is unaudited
- Something like $2MM seems to have shown up on the balance sheet along with around 11 million shares, but there's no mention of a sale of securities.
- The company came into existence after a somewhat shady reverse merger with a holding company that typically is a sign of someone trying to conceal the actual ownership of a company, especially since the holding company used to be in the Oil&Gas business
- The most fun part though is that this reverse merger seems to have already generated a lawsuit.
- No mention of how they plan to actually generate revenues either.
Don't know how long I give the company in terms of survival. Maybe Google can buy them up cheap when they go chapter 11, or whatever a delaware corporation whose head office is canada fileswhen it goes out of business. Though maybe Google'd want to stear clear of the lawsuits that might follow. Anyone else have a perspective on this aspect of the company?Anyone have the inside scoop?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
It's all well and good to talk about how good the system is, or how old the database or how good the search algorithm is - but the main point is that they are not tracing you. They don't want to know where you are from so they can target you with advertising or sell your info off to some mass marketers. With the internet becoming more commercial this is becoming rarer - especially now that the gov't is also trying to take our liberty away as well. Good on you TopClick.
To me, the name TopClick sounds like something an entrepenuer or something came up in the midst of some dollar-making dream. Or a banner ad service or something.
Although I do like the site, overall, There's little that one can do to improve upon Google, which is what it appears TopClick is doing.
They have the right idea, though.
This is a good thing, in my opinion. Even if it doesn't turn out to be a very good search engine in and of itself, it's raising the level of attention that privacy gets. :)
There was a fair amount of outrage at the recent RealNetworks fiasco when it was discovered the jukebox was collecting information on its users. There was a bit more when Doubleclick decided to identify people and collect statistics on them. Imagine the outrage if, when a company that's been hyping privacy (because otherwise nobody does business with you) turns out to have violated it
In my view, raising the level of attention that privacy issues get is a definite Good Thing.
-Denor
What I've never understood is how a site like this supports itself, much less turns a profit. It doesn't have any banner ads, so it can't earn advertising revenue, and it doesn't harvest consumer data, so it can't sell it. Yet it provides a service that costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to set up and maintain. How???!!!
Daniel J. Peng
You can read about TopClick's financials and future plans through their SEC filing. Note that they have no revenue.
Also, they are apparently planning to "replace the existing search-based site [...] in February, 2000" (oops) at which time "the existing search-based web site will be retired from service". So don't get too hooked on their search engine!
Well, it helps if you search for topclick, the way they spell it themselves. (note: no space)
Not a flame, though. It's still a weakness, especially when "top click" (just like that, with the quotes and all" doesn't work either. Don't know that any other search engine would work better, though.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I'll support the site, hopefully this is the beginning of a trend.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
There have been fast easy to use search engines available on the wwwww thang for a while now. Check out http://www.alltheweb.com. No ads, fast, easy to use etc.. Its some sort of big advert for Compaq or something, but it doesnt mean that its not useful.
Is this the start of more and more companies who view strong privacy as the product itself? No, not at all. This is a company that wants to cash in on what they see as a recent internet community backlash against people who were buying and selling personal information. I doubt that in this case privacy is the product - it's just a feature of the product meant to lure the disillusioned...
IMHO the disillusioned should realize that they are disillusioned for a reason; namely, that when it comes right down to it, companies are about profit, and if earning lots of money conflicts with protecting the consumer, then "Oh well". I'd like to see this company's privacy policy in a few years (assuming it survives that long) when it wants to go public, become more profitable, and expand all at the same time.
'Scuse me, but I'm feeling particularly bitter tonight.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
From reading others informative posts, I've discerned that TopClick as yet has no method of creating revenue. Their planned services center around providing better privacy for their (paying I assume) customers. The current search site will be discontinued (In Feb 2000, so I guess they are a bit late).
So presumably, they are just providing the search service for free to generate traffic to their site, which will later change focus to actually have some method of generating focus, and the search engine will be removed. It seems to me they would be wiser to leave the search engine running and instead add some links to entice users to take a look at their advanced services. That way they would continue to generate traffic to their site. Instead of users who find that their new favorite search engine disappeared have no intention of using the services of a company who pulled such a dirty trick on them. Just my $.02.
Spyky
Just a thought, but they have said elsewhere that they have a product they plan to announce in the future. The search site is merely part of the package. From the name "TopClick" I would assume that while they will not be tracking any personal information, they *will* be tracking the number of clicks made on each URL in the database. Presumably they plan to capitalize on this information somehow. Tracking queries in this manner ought to be fairly straightforward, but if the site gets lots of usage, they can combine the google info on best sources of information with the topclick info on most popular destinations to derrive information they can sell somehow - presumably to advertisers.
All the while completely preserving the anonymity of their users while they search. Not a bad tradeoff if they don't abuse it in any way.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Basically, you're switching because why? It uses Google (so does google), its pages are small and load fast (so does google), and it has a well-designed interface (so does google). So why did you say you were switching again?
If they called it Google, would that entice you even further to switch?
Esperandi
Ok. A new search engine. (hum)
...
Uses Google (so do I, what's your point?)
Hmm. Going away soon, according to a poster on Slashdot. (so why should I use them?)
Well, lets see what it's got under the hood...
Search for Top Click
BWAHAHAHAHA
I love it. A search engine that can't find itself!
-----
No Zen is good zen
I searched for "Stuff" as my first search on TopClick, just to see what search results look like. The results were quite interesting.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
I agree with you, except that you're wrong about google's use of cookies. Observe:
llama:~$ nc google.com 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 01:30:56 GMT
Server: GWS/1.6
Connection: close
Set-Cookie: ID=6011ba7756ca44bd; domain=.google.com; path=/; expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT
Content-Length: 1539
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 04:58:03 GMT
See the Set-Cookie header?
Even so, I mostly agree with your point that there doesn't seem to be any advantage to topclick over google, since neither one uses banner adds to help some nasty company track you. OTOH, topclick is making a point about their privacy intentions, and I like that. I'll support them for that any day, as long as they're in the same league. (and they are, since they use google:).
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
This search engine appears to have just about everything I've been looking for in a search engine:
They seem to be using the same database as Google -- I did a search for a few of my old email addresses (stuff that gets results from Google, pages that are no longer up any more), and I got the same results that I got with Google.
Plus, it's runing Apache/PHP:
(bfm4) $ HEAD
http://www.topclick.com/
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:42:35 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) PHP/3.0.7
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:30:03 GMT
Client-Peer: 204.71.176.40:80
All in all, it looks like I'll be switching. The Bookstore has a bunch of Security related articles and books as well, categorized into secitons like Encryption, Consumer Profiling, and Spam.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
Check this out:
The Company has developed a substantial privacy-based information site with thousands of links to privacy issues, news, books and organizations. The company is constantly updating and improving this site and when it is ready for proper launch it will replace the existing search-based site as the home page and central focus of the web site in February, 2000. At such time, the existing search-based web site will be retired from service.
give me a break...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
Okay... let's see...
...MoO!
* TopClick is "secure"... since it doesn't use cookies? Erm... when was the last time you saw Google use cookies for anything? And even if it did, just turn them off in your browser if you're worried about that.
* TopClick doesn't use banner advertising... neither does Google.
* TopClick uses Google's database indirectly... same results, slightly slower (since you ask TopClick, it asks Google, gets Google's reply and then gives it to you).
* TopClick is running under linux... so is Google.
* TopClick runs Apache... Google runs its own custom server. Wow... who cares, so long as it works?
Is it just me, or is there really no reason to switch from Google? We probably all have more trust for Google than some new group, so why make the change?
Ian explained that TopClick believes there is a substantial segment of the Net population concerned with privacy, and that at least part of that segment would be willing to pay for services that protect privacy. Thus, while the search engine will remain free, TopClick will charge for other products they plan on rolling out (such as AllowMail, which another poster mentioned).
A previous poster mentioned that he thought the name TopClick sounds particularly cheesey. While I'm not certain, I suspect that the name is intended to raise the specter of DoubleClick in your mind. Certainly for anyone concerned for their privacy, DoubleClick is never far from mind.
So basically, the deal is this: the company seems to sincerely believe (in Mr. McCallum's words) "that every single member of the online community has an inherent and indisputable right to privacy on the Internet." They are going to work to educate the Net population, through their comprehensive Privacy Center. And they believe they are among the first of a (hopefully long) stream of companies that will prove wrong all those naysayers who cluck that privacy and profit are incompatible.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society