Scroogle Has Been Blocked 281
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."
Re:Scroogle (Score:3, Interesting)
Duck Duck Go (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to use Scroogle for privacy reasons, but switched to Duck Duck Go [duckduckgo.com] a few weeks ago. It is quickly becoming a great privacy-respecting alternative to Google and often gives more relevant results than Google.
Umm (Score:5, Interesting)
When google wants them to stop, they'll be hearing from lawyers........ not just finding that google changed their page layout.
Re:Optimize Google Firefox Extension (Score:2, Interesting)
I have been using this extension for Firefox called Optimize Google. http://www.optimizegoogle.com/ [optimizegoogle.com] It has the ability to disable click tracking and Google's ad services as well as a bunch of other features. Whether it works is up for debate.
You use it, but don't know if it works?
Re:Scroogle (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Scroogle (Score:3, Interesting)
and less hoops for INTERPOL, German Federal police, etc. Also, there is then no protection, even in theory, from NSA or CIA operations as that becomes "over-seas" and thus fertile ground. I guess it all depends on who you're trying to slightly inconvenience, though.
Re:Scroogle (Score:4, Interesting)
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"...
www.google.com/ie gone -- also used by the blind. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why should i trust scroogle more than google? (Score:2, Interesting)
Trustworthy people usually don't have such a whiny sense of entitlement. They've probably been a honeypot all along.
Re:Need for anonymous search engine (Score:4, Interesting)
I just think Google is smarter than that. Facebook is king of the internet right now, but they are alienating their users at every turn.
They forget that Myspace was once the largest social networking company out there. Facebook could fall to second banana just as easily the second a better alternative shows up.
Google however is smart enough to realize that their entire business model is about getting users to use their products so they can serve up contextual ads. If they piss their users off, it destroys their business model.
Their April Fool's prank was to name themselves Topeka for a day. They were basically saying "we love you too". In fact, they've directly said it to me.
They had award nominations for open source contributers. I nominated Andrew Morton, not realizing at the time that Google was paying him to work on Linux full time. I got an email back from Google explaing that it made Morton ineligible for the award.
I responded saying that it was just one more reason I loved Google, because they pay guys like Andrew Morton. I literally got an email back from Google saying "We love you too."
The world is full of shitty companies that don't care about their customers/users. They just don't get it. I really think Google is the exception to the rule.
Re:Scroogle (Score:4, Interesting)
The US can't do that in the US either. Just an FYI.
" Frankly, EU and European countries take privacy a lot more seriously,"
Care to back that up? I mean when you can take time away from being on public video, told what you can and can not say, carrying papers,
IT would be more correct to say it treats privacy different;which makes sense because what it considered ''privacy' is different. For example, what you do in public can be considered 'private' in some countries.
Of course it's such a patch work in the EU, it's almost nonsense to say to use the EU as a generally statement concerning privacy.
Re:Duck Duck Go (Score:1, Interesting)
Sounded good. Checked it out. Saw "This site requires JavaScript" and some links didn't work. Google works without javascript or cookies....