Scroogle is maybe gone for good?

Al Today

Al Today

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
:cry: :cry: :cry:
Many have used scroogle instead of google. Google is hosing them over. I found out when I tried a search...

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

only to get:
We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002.

This interface (here's a sample from years ago) was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every Google data center in exactly the same form, which allowed us to use 700 IP addresses for Google.

That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. It didn't show the snippets unless you moused-over the links it produced (they were there for our program, so that was okay), and it has never had any ads. Our impression was that these results were from Google's basic algorithms, and that extra features and ads were added on top of these generic results. Three years ago Google launched "Universal Search," which meant that they added results from other Google services on their pages. But this simple interface we were using was not affected at all.

Now that interface is gone. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google's main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it.

Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don't hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers, at all.

— Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, scroogle AT lavabit.com
Click to expand...

Is this the beginning of the end? Or just a small chapter from the book of greed?
 
Also just found out about this unfortunate development.

Scroogle is/was really handy for keeping your searches private. Although I do use Tor as well, that is a bit slow and inconvenient when searching through various sites.

We'll see if Scroogle will manage to bounce back but don't see much hope of that.
 
I think www.startpage.com might be a good alternative. At least from my limited research on it.

http://startpage.com/
http://startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html
 
Just stumbled on it a few minutes ago... :(
Thanks for the Startpage link, it seems to work pretty well also in different language queries.
 
Seems like Scroogle is down again, this time it might be for good. :(

Here's their statement http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi

July 1, 2010: Here we go again...

We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002.

This interface (here's a sample from years ago) was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every Google data center in exactly the same form, which allowed us to use 700 IP addresses for Google.

That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. It didn't show the snippets unless you moused-over the links it produced (they were there for our program, so that was okay), and it has never had any ads. Our impression was that these results were from Google's basic algorithms, and that extra features and ads were added on top of these generic results. Three years ago Google launched "Universal Search," which meant that they added results from other Google services on their pages. But this simple interface we were using was not affected at all.

It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google's main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, too bloated, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

After a lot of suggestions from Scroogle users, and a fair amount of publicity, we found a fix and Scroogle was back in 24 hours. This fix was to insert an extra parameter, &output=ie, into the search terms that were relayed to Google. The extra parameter recovered the same interface that we thought was gone forever.

Now it seems like it actually might be gone forever. Late on June 30, 2010, the results produced while using this parameter began to shift to the usual busy Google interface with ads and a left-margin sidebar. Scroogle users saw a Scroogle page that said, "Google returned no results for this search," when in fact Google returned results but our scraper was unable to deal with them. Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it.

Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don't hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers.

— Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, scroogle AT lavabit.com
Click to expand...
 
Yeah I noticed that scroogle was down again. I use it but the only thing I missed was how with g**gle you can search for images and forums.

GRiM said:
I think www.startpage.com might be a good alternative. At least from my limited research on it.

http://startpage.com/
http://startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link, this looks better than scroogle.
 
Startpage seems to be very good as far as privacy practices are concerned, but I'm not sure about their search. When I read this SOTT article recently, I had just discovered startpage.com, so I decided to pull a little experiment. I typed in each of the test phrases from the SOTT article into Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, and Startpage, to see which one returned the intended SOTT article most accurately and reliably. Google and Dogpile were so-so, but generally returned the correct article on the fist page of results, although not always (Dogpile was better, as I recall, or at least it didn't hide any results). Yahoo actually performed best, returning the correct article within the first six or so results every time. Startpage, however, actually completely failed to find two of the SOTT articles, although it found the copies of that article on some other sites. Even Google didn't completely omit any articles (I was able to find the missing ones by "displaying omitted results"), so I found that surprising and worrying. Perhaps the privacy of Startpage is not without penalty? Further research would be appreciated.
 
[quote author=rylek]
Seems like Scroogle is down again, this time it might be for good. :( [/quote]

Realize this is from rylek's 2010 post and have not seen anything listed later, but just asking if others are using this too and experiencing recent blocking? Have been using this for sometime and now, in the last week, this is what comes up and never works, even after the 10 minute prescribed wait.

Tried to cut and paste what it says but now it does not even load. It has been saying something like Sorry, Google is blocking...try again in 10 minutes.
 
It seems to be impossible to use this service any longer. :(

Have a look at https://www.ixquick.com/ if you have never heard of it before.
 
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