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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."

13 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. DuckDuckGo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They've a clear policy of not sharing or collecting info

    1. Re:DuckDuckGo by hobarrera · · Score: 5, Informative

      If only the results where competitive with Google's. But they're not, and it's a shame, because I like DDG in principle, but when it comes to results, they're not there yet.

    2. Re:DuckDuckGo by steelfood · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They need a better brand if they want to make it big. I'm not commenting on the service per se. But the brand name itself is a big element in what draws new users.

      It's three words, comprising one syllable each. So it's effectively five units in length of time to say. Not only that, but the hard "K" in "duck" forces the intermediate pause between the first two words, and encourages it between the latter two (attempts to say the name in only three units' time would sound closer to DU-DUCK-O). The pauses in between each of the individual words carries over from speech to mental reading and writing. Both the writer and the reader, are speaking their words inside their heads when they write or read. Which means the brand is both annoying to read and write about.

      The repetition of "duck" makes the URL pretty annoying to type as well. At they very least, they can get a shorter domain that's easy to remember! For other types of products, the need might be different, but for a text-based internet destination, it's gotta be easy to type. They got the "duck" and "go" parts are more or less correct (no one-finger acrobatics needed to type the words), but the repeated duck completely negates the benefit.

      Otherwise, they seem like an acceptable alternative to Scroogle. I've used them before, but Google is just easier to type (the double-o detracts a bit, but the brevity of the name more than makes up for this), so I always end up going back to Google.

      --
      "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
    3. Re:DuckDuckGo by Rick17JJ · · Score: 4, Informative

      Startpage does not record your IP address or track your searches. The Startpage the results are actually generated by Google.

      Startpage supports SSL. So, when I type in Startpage.com, "https" appears in front of their URL instead of "http." That extra "s" tells me that that encryption is being used between my browser and the Startpage servers.

      The sister search engine to Startpage is Ixquick. If I am not mistaken, the Ixquick search results are generated by various search engines other than Google.

      Startpage also offers the option of viewing web sites through their proxy service. When selecting something from their search results, just click on "view by Ixquick proxy." Then, they only see the Startpage IP address, instead of your IP address. However, I have almost never actually bothered to use the proxy feature.

      Privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht is the enthusiastic spokeswoman for Startpage.

      https://startpage.com/

  2. 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.

    1. Re:Scroogle is not a search engine. by ozmanjusri · · Score: 4, Informative

      duk duo go pulls search queries from bing

      No it doesn't, it's searches are actually quite good.

      From Wikipedia:
      "DuckDuckGo's results are a mashup of many sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha and its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot.[2][21][22] It uses data from crowd-sourced sites, especially Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes, which are grey boxes containing topic summaries and related topics above results.[23] DuckDuckGo also offers the ability to show mostly shopping sites or mostly info (non-shopping) sites via search buttons on its homepage.[24]"

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    2. Re:Scroogle is not a search engine. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      duk duo go pulls search queries from bing

      Oh, so it does get its search results from Google after all.

    3. Re:Scroogle is not a search engine. by SnowZero · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No it doesn't

      Yes it does. Search for [digital camera] on Bing and DDG. Notice that the first ad is not just similar, it is exactly the same:

      Sony® Digital Cameras
      Digital Cameras for Beautiful Pictures. Free Shipping Order Now!
      store.sony.com

      Ok, so they are using AdCenter for ads, but that might not be true for actual search results. Now search for something esoteric and not likely to be in a tiny corpus, such as [state space motion planning]. The results have been re-ordered so clearly DDG has some re-ranking heuristics, but the results that are common (nearly all of them) are uncannily similar, including in most cases the exact same summary snippet. For example, the following exact result (all text) comes back in both:

      Informed and Probabilistically Complete Search for Motion Planning ...
      Sampling-based search has been shown effective in motion planning, a hard continuous state-space problem. Motion planning is especially challenging when the robotic system

      Having a common phrase used throughout a paper yield exactly the same extracted snippet is unlikely, unless the implementations are identical. Since Bing isn't open source, Occam's Razor says they are using the API.

      The simple fact is that one guy cannot implement a modern search engine, despite our hopes for the continued relevance of the garage revolutionary. While DDG likes to downplay the Bing API dependence, the majority of results come from there, and the rest is a few bits of sugar peppered on top for common queries. Claiming that having a special mode for wikipedia or "zero click" boxes makes it no longer Bing-using is kind of like saying Google's calculator means it doesn't need a search index.

  3. DuckDuckGo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Seriously, DuckDuckGo has the friendliest privacy policy around. They don't track you or bubble you. They run a TOR exit enclave, and if you're already using TOR, you can reach their search engine without exiting the onion by using their hidden service.

  4. Daniel Brandt is a loony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Daniel Brandt is a loony. His first tussle with Google started about 10 years ago when he ran a conspiracy theory site and demanded to know why Google wouldn't show his site in the first page when people searched for famous people names. He attempted to start a movement to force Congress to make Google a public utility service and created google-watch! He created scroogle shortly after, to get back at google (it was nothing but a scraper of google results), and claimed that the back-end code was written in C for maximum speed. He even published the scroogle source code to prove it. I remember reading it then and it was a badly written CGI program with several buffer overflows (As a side note, the guy also seemed to be totally unaware of the overheads of running CGI scripts, whether written in C or any other language, or basics of tuning an Apache server. This explained why his site couldn't handle too many requests in the first place!)

  5. Re:Hackers with a vendetta? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

    OK, thanks, here goes:

    *** PLEASE FORWARD TO THE APPROPRIATE STAFF MEMBERS ****

    Dear Sirs:

    I have been requested by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company has recently concluded a large number of contracts for oil exploration in the sub-Sahara region. The contracts have immediately produced moneys equalling US$40,000,000. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company is desirous of oil exploration in other parts of the world, however, because of certain regulations of the Nigerian Government, it is unable to move these funds to another region.

        You assistance is requested as a non-Nigerian citizen to assist the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, and also the Central Bank of Nigeria, in moving these funds out of Nigeria. If the funds can be transferred to your name, in your United States account, then you can forward the funds as directed by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company. In exchange for your accommodating services, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company would agree to allow you to retain 10%, or US$4 million of this amount.

                    However, to be a legitimate transferee of these moneys according to Nigerian law, you must presently be a depositor of at least US$100,000 in a Nigerian bank which is regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria.

                    If it will be possible for you to assist us, we would be most grateful. We suggest that you meet with us in person in Lagos, and that during your visit I introduce you to the representatives of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, as well as with certain officials of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

                    Please call me at your earliest convenience at 234-598-212-5419. Time is of the essence in this matter; very quickly the Nigerian Government will realize that the Central Bank is maintaining this amount on deposit, and attempt to levy certain depository taxes on it.

    You

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  6. Re:About Daniel Brandt by jdogalt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ""I don't regard [Brandt] as a valid source about anything at all..." - Jimbo Wales"

    That sounds like a cut and dry +5 perspective. But being the same sort of person as Daniel Brandt (or at least, I presume the same slashdot commenters calling him a looney would call me one as well), I decided to use non-google search engines, and results not already posted here, to try and make a real evaluation of D.B. I found a long thread he participated in, that was remarkably coherent, and intelligent, about his experiments reverse engineering how google works. Say what you will, but technically, on subjects he is passionate about, he comes off very well. In fact, he's so clever, all he had to do was throw in a bizarre offhand comment such as 'tighter than a bikini on a Bomis babe', and it inspired me to google that, and get this wired article, which IMO should negate the +5 of the parent comment. Jimmy Wales does not come off looking like such a valid source , after reading this- http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880

    "Public edit logs reveal that Wales has changed his own Wikipedia bio 18 times, deleting phrases describing former Wikipedia employee Larry Sanger as a co-founder of the site.

    Wales has also repeatedly revised the description of a search site he founded called Bomis, which included a section with adult photos called "Bomis Babes.""

  7. 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.