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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?"
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.
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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.
Except that there are a few large banner ad companies (like doubleclick.net) and the banner ads you see all come from doubleclick's server, NOT the site you're viewing. So doubleclick can and does track your movement around the web, for every site that uses them.
[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.
Wrong. In order to set a cookie on your machine it must be set in the HTTP header. This means that if you go to xyz.com or whatever and they have a banner ad, xyz.com generates the HTTP header and puts in it a link to the banner ad when you go there. Doubleclick can not send you anything whatsoever because they are not sending you an HTTP header.
Esperandi
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