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Scroogle Has Been Blocked

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-that's-not-very-nice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Scroogle, the secure third-party Google search interface, has been blocked by Google. Scroogle was an SSL-based search proxy that enabled one to search for and receive Google results over an SSL connection in a pseudo-anonymous manner."

5 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Scroogle by sopssa · · Score: 4, Informative

    While I would love to see a good rant towards Google and while I also myself use Scroogle, the summary isn't really being truthful. Google hasn't blocked anything, they just changed the page that Scroogle scrapes and they're throwing a hissy fit about it.

    From the Scroogle announcement:

    We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google.

    That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time.

    Now that interface is gone. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google's main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

    Google changing something isn't exactly "blocking" a third party service. Even more so, it's just a few lines of code to get the results from main Google search too. All the search results and links have approciate html ID's associated to them and it's been the same for years already.

    I have no idea why Scroogle is bitching about this.

    Oh well. I changed to use ixquick, which also has the added benefit of being located in the Germany rather than US and a lot better and useful interface.

    -sopssa

    1. Re:Scroogle by sopssa · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the FAQ:

      European Privacy Seal
      On July 14th 2008 Ixquick received the first European Privacy Seal from European Data Protection Supervisor Mr. Peter Hustinx. The Seal officially confirms the privacy promises we make to our users. It makes Ixquick the first and only EU-approved search engine. Both EU Commissioner Viviane Reding and Dr.Thilo Weichert, German Privacy Commissioner complemented Ixquick on its privacy achievements.
      You can find the press release here.

      Since I am in EU, it also means US can't just randomly get data that doesn't belong to them, ie. for people from other countries. Frankly, EU and European countries take privacy a lot more seriously, for historical reasons too.

    2. Re:Scroogle by _xeno_ · · Score: 5, Informative

      Because if they did that, they'd be forced to abide by the search Terms of Service. And they appear to be violating Section 1.4.

      By using the generic web robot approach, they're allowed to scrape Google based on the same concepts that allow Google to scrape third party web pages in the first place.

      From Google's robots.txt:
      User-agent: *
      [snip]
      Disallow: /ie?

      Well, OK, so they're not obeying robots.txt in the first place. But ignoring that one pesky fact, uh...

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
    3. Re:Scroogle by Smauler · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Data Protection Act in the UK was as a result of the Data Protection Directive from the EU. This severely limits what people and/or companies and/or governmental agencies (with some exceptions to the last) can do with information about you. I'm not aware of legislation as strong as this in the US, but I may be wrong.

      I do agree that different countries treat privacy differently - I personally believe that anything I do in public is basically that - public. I won't ever carry papers in my own country, so if somehow the ID card in the UK goes through (looking very very unlikely at the moment), I'll just lose mine every time I get a new one, and reapply. Some people don't have a problem with such things, but I do. The EU is a very diverse place, but that data protection directive means that all EU countries have similar laws with regards to data protection AFAIK.

  2. Re:I don't get it - why "scrape" at all? by MartinSchou · · Score: 5, Informative

    Doesn't that one require a key that only supports 1,000 searches per day?

    That kind of thing would make Scroogle useless. And since Scroogle has no interest in paying Google for the results, they aren't going to purchase the kind of access they'd like to have.