Scroogle Has Been Blocked

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."

Comments

Re:Scroogle

[sopssa]

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.

Re:I don't get it - why "scrape" at all?

[MartinSchou]

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.

Re:Scroogle

[_xeno_]

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...