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Privacy-Centric Search Engine Scroogle Shuts Down

Posted by Soulskill on from the rock-and-a-hard-place dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Daniel Brandt started his 'Scroogle' search engine because he wanted to provide increased privacy to people who searched online through Google. Unfortunately, while Google tolerated this for a while, they began throttling Scroogle queries. This, in combination with extensive DDoS attacks on Brandt's servers, has caused him to take Scroogle offline, along with his other domains. He said, 'I no longer have any domains online. I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers. Scroogle.org is gone forever. Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google's throttling, and was already dying. It might have lasted another six months if I hadn't lost seven servers from DDoS, but that's about all.' Internet users who made use of the services will now need to investigate other options."

2 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Scroogle is not a search engine. by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Scroogle is not a search engine. Scroogle is a hosted front end to Google. DuckDuckGo is a real search engine, one with good privacy policies and only one ad per page.

  2. Sort of by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They had a toolbar, if you clicked the 'send anonymous statistics data to Microsoft to improve our services' button then it was supposed to send anonymous stats to MS. However it turned out they were scraping the queries you ran on Google and sending the whole lot, results, the search, what you clicked on etc. back to Microsoft.

    And not anonymous data either. Detailed tracking data, and a unique id that can be used to de-anonymize you.

    It was Carrier IQ in IE form.

    To me what made it worse is they were unrepentant once caught. Pretending it wasn't copying because they took these 'signals' from many sites and the result was merged. Which is incredible face. They didn't even pretend not to be tracking their users, they were proud of it.

    And no prosecution either, nobody chased them, too much clout in politics.