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The privacy-oriented search engine Findx has shut down: https://privacore.github.io/
The reasons cited are:
- While people are starting to understand the importance of privacy it is a major hurdle to get them to select a different search engine.
- Search engines eat resources like crazy, so operating costs are non-negligible.
- Some sites (including e.g. github) use a whitelist in robots.txt, blocking new crawlers.
- The amount of spam, link-farms, referrer-linking, etc. is beyond your worst nightmare.
- Returning good results takes a long time to fine-tune.
- Monetizing is nearly impossible because advertising networks want to know everything about the users, going against privacy concerns.
- Buying search results from other search engines is impossible until you have least x million searches/month. Getting x million searches/month is impossible unless you buy search results from other search engines (or sink a lot of cash into making it yourself).
So what do you soylentils think can be done to increase privacy for ordinary users, search-engine-wise ?
Dislaimer: I worked at Findx.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:09PM (2 children)
I use https://searx.me/ [searx.me] in addition to the GOOG. Searx appears to use a donation funding model.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @06:55PM (1 child)
Is searx a search engine? I got the impression that it's a "meta" search -- sending searches out to various actual search engines (which are user controllable). I've been using the searx.org instance which often finds what I'm looking for.
This seems like a decent way to get around the advertising & tracking on the big sites...at least until they learn to filter out requests from searx instances.
(Score: 2) by isj on Wednesday November 21 2018, @07:22PM
Searx is a meta search engine. It doesn't not have its own index. Instead if calls out to google/yahoo/bing/yandex/... depending on configuration.