Scroogle, Private Google Searching, May Close Doors

May 12, 2010 - 8:16 am 3 by
Filed Under Misc Google

Daniel Brandt, well-known for his dislike for some of Google's actions and the owner of Scroogle, said he may close down the Scroogle web site. Scroogle is known for searching Google but with privacy, they promise to not serve you no cookies, not record search-term and delete all access log deleted within 48 hours.

But when the new Google design launched last week, it made it hard for Scroogle to continue. Scroogle scraps Google results and show them to you on their web site. Technically what Scroogle is doing is against the terms of service, but Google didn't specifically target Scroogle with this design change - it was collateral damage.

Scroogle posted a notice explaining why some searches no longer work:

Sorry, but we are unable to provide results from Google.

Most errors are because three or more valid characters must be in the search box before we pass them along. Languages other than English require that your browser support the UTF-8 character set. Sometimes our request to Google does not get through, and you should try again.

Yesterday, it stopped working completely, but it does seem like some of the searches do continue to work.

For some history on Scroogle.org, it was blocked back in 2003 but came back soon after. This site is pretty old, going on 8 years.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

 

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