

Scroogle down - leftblank
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi

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robk
Why would Google care about this? The ad uses Google's results and strips ads
and cookie data, meaning they are taking from Google and giving nothing in
return. Further, they use an unsupported method to scrape Google.

I can see the social value of anonymizing searches but Google shouldn't bear
any blame for product changes that break derivative, unsupported third party
products.

As a product manager, it's a nightmare when you're afraid to change (or retire
an older version of) a successful product because some third party was using
it in a unsupported way.

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epi0Bauqu
Alt: <https://duckduckgo.com/> (<https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html>)

~~~
gnosis
Also see: <https://us2.ixquick.com/> (<https://us2.ixquick.com/eng/protect-
privacy.html>)

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arethuza
I'm amazed that they have been able to run this service for 5 years - the fact
that Google hasn't stopped them in that time says more about Google that it
does about Scroogle.

~~~
jacquesm
That was exactly what I wrote below :)

I figure google doesn't mind scroogle at all, maybe is even amused by it (but
that's reading the tealeaves). Someone inside google has had to push some
buttons to permit scroogle to continue the scraping for as long as they did,
normally they would have been auto-blocked in an eye blink.

~~~
zandorg
I think Google wanted to shut them down because Scroogle offer an SSL search
service, so all searches are encrypted. Too much privacy, Google would say.

~~~
jacquesm
The number of searches through scroogle per day compared to google directly is
so low that I don't think that was a factor here.

~~~
gnosis
How do you know the number of searches that went through Scroogle was so low
it wasn't a factor? It may well have been a factor. Or it might not have been.
We simply don't know.

~~~
jacquesm
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/google.com+scroogle.com/>

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medecau
Why not use something like
<http://www.google.com/xhtml?q=google%20mobile%20search> ?

~~~
fragmede
I would think that the ajax API could also be twisted to their needs. It
requires an API key that Google puts some limits on, limits that they might
want to apply to Scroogle in any case.
<http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/>

~~~
goodness
Actually, their docs claim that the limits aren't really related to the API
key. The API key is just so they can contact you if they start blocking you:

    
    
      http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/key.html
    

That may just be disinformation though. For example, if you can spread your
usage over multiple IPs, you might be allowed more searches than if you told
them your API key for all your requests on multiple IP addresses.

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abcdef98765
It seems like the Slashdot and Hacker News comments have missed perhaps a key
point. If any of you know of other search engines that meet these two
criteria, please let me know:

1\. Queries are passed as x-www-form-urlencoded via HTTP POST not as plain
text strings via HTTP GET e.g.
www.example.com/?q=heres+my+query+for+you+to+look+at vs www.example.com/cgi-
bin/do.cgi

2\. Queries of numerous diverse users at numerous diverse IP's are aggregated
through a small set of IP's (Scroogle's), and Scroogle's servers are not
scattered across the globe.

While this may not offer "privacy", it certainly makes it more difficult for a
server to filter and/or redirect based on query string and approximated
geolocation. Scroogle is obviously not catering to the common marketing
platform. Otherwise they would be more interested to know what people are
searching for, and where they are are searching from.

Scroogle's design makes it difficult for Google to serve up "personalised"
and/or "localised" ads and results. (Even if they did not go through the
trouble to scrub the ads and dump all cookies this would still be true.)

Some users may appreciate such _relatively_ "raw" results.

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abcdef98765
Correction: There is no ad scrubbing involved. The results pages Scroogle
scrapes (output=ie) have no ads to begin with. And, for whatever it's worth,
they trigger less cookies from Google (only the PREF cookie is used, when I
checked).

To reiterate what I said before, the difference is Scroogle allows the user
query to be submitted via POST and over SSL.

The POST method effectively limits what the server can do with the data and
what it can trigger automatically in the browser, without user input. Perhaps
this is good for the user (more control), and bad for the marketer (less
control). As such, it could be a controversial topic.

RFC 2616 Sec. 15.1.3 discussed the use of POST in the interests of privacy.

It would be nice if the output=ie option worked with Google Scholar/Patents
and if Scroogle then supported Scholar searches.

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MikeCapone
It's really too bad. I kind of wish that Google would offer a stripped down,
encrypted search page that promises not to store anything.

Kind of like how browsers have a "privacy mode", Google could also offer a
"private searching mode".

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abcdef98765
It should be no surprise that Google's API's will never let users use the HTTP
POST method. Those HTTP GET query strings are "valuable data"; Google is a
business, not a charity. Hence Scroogle is doing something unique (AFAIK) by
letting users use HTTP POST.

------
gnosis
Another HN discussion about the Scroogle outage here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1337099>

