

Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup) - drm237

There's been a lot in the news lately about search engine privacy, so I thought for a quick project it might be interesting to make a site that doesn't allow the search engines to track you.  It's still alpha quality, but please take a look and give me some feedback.  Thanks.
<a href="http://www.flyvault.com/safesearch" rel="nofollow">http://www.flyvault.com/safesearch</a>

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bls
Instead of giving our private information to Google to use for 18 months, we
are giving it to you to use indefinitely?

Where is your privacy policy?

And, what is your hosting provider's policy? I found out recently that my
hosting provider refused to make any guarantees; that means that I cannot make
any guarantees either, since my hosting provider has full access to my server.

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drm237
A privacy policy is very high on my list of things to do, along with an
explanation of how it works so that people can feel confident in their
privacy. Right now, the only thing I record is a SHA1 has of everyone's IP
address and a timestamp so that I can track how many unique people have used
it. With the SHA1 hash, there's no (very difficult) way to trace that back to
the user. I'm also talking to my host about the web server logs and how
quickly those can be purged.

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fadmmatt
I hope that's SHA1 plus a secret salt.

Otherwise, I can just build a reverse map of SHA1'd ips.

for ip = 0 to 2^32: unhash[SHA1(ip)] = ip.

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drm237
Yes it is. But first you'd have to get all of the results from my database,
which is cleared every 24 hours (this is not a challenge!).

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tomek
It's a nice initiative. You have probably heard of Scroogle
(<http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htl>). How different is your thing
from their thing?

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drm237
They're very similar. The difference is that I like our interface better and
we provide unlimited scrolling of the results. If people like the site and
want to use it, I'm also planning on adding other search engines.

For the most part, it's been an experiment on my part to have a public site
that people use. I've built quite a few sites, but this is the first with AJAX
and some other technologies, so it's been a learning project for me as well.

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drm237
It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google,
but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google
in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.

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davidw
Isn't that against their terms of service or something?

How's this different/better from some kind of anonymizing proxy like tor?

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drm237
With things like tor, it can be a little slower, especially if you just want
to do a single search. With this, we've added in the feature so you can add it
to your Firefox/IE7 search box and then easily use it right from the browser.
So it's the same idea, we're just focusing on this one feature for the good of
the community.

The other feature we have is endless scrolling, so if you search and can't
find it in the first few results, you can just keep scrolling and we'll
continue to populate it. That's something not many others have.

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nickb
Awesome! It's better, faster, nicer looking than Scroogle.org

