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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."
I used to use Scroogle for privacy reasons, but switched to Duck Duck Go a few weeks ago. It is quickly becoming a great privacy-respecting alternative to Google and often gives more relevant results than Google.
When google wants them to stop, they'll be hearing from lawyers........ not just finding that google changed their page layout.
What's more, the link they were scraping off of [www.google.com/ie] seems to be related to Google's support of Internet Explorer. Since it's been replaced with a "go get IE 8" page, it's probably been dumped to encourage people to dump their older versions of IE and get something newer.
A couple fun facts about Scroogle:
1. Since Scroogle hit multiple Google IPs, it used to be possible to search the same keywords 5 or 6 times in a row and see the variation in page rank. Great for web site owners to see how they ranked.
2. Scroogle dot COM is NSFW at all, so when telling people about Scroogle it was usually CRUCIAL to emphasize the dot ORG part of the domain. At a previous job I made the mistake of telling my boss about it without emphasizing the dot ORG part and, well... he got an eyeful of the wrong type of "org"...
The wife used the www.google.com/ie interface for accessability reasons. It worked much better for her with her screen reader. She's totally blind. She'll miss the interface and I know there were others using it for the same reason.