Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by takyon on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the found-and-lost dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Apparition on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:06PM (5 children)

    by Apparition (6835) on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:06PM (#764779) Journal

    I use a combination of Startpage and DuckDuckGo. Together, they work well enough for me. The only "major" search engine I've used in years is Bing, and that's for Bing Maps in particular.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Informative=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:51PM (1 child)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:51PM (#764800) Journal

    I use duckduckgo, but not exclusively.

    2 reasons.
    1. It's real easy to switch search engines when your default is ddg. !g is really easy to type when you need it.
    2. "django SuspiciousMultipartForm exception javascript" fairly often gives less useful results than "!g django SuspiciousMultipartForm exception javascript". The complexity of some searches can easily overwhelm their comparatively simple algorithm.

    But if you're still going straight to google for anything? Why?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:34PM (#764833)

      You know the !g bit is absolutely brilliant.

      It does 2 things.

      The user basically usually immediately gets what they need they are happy. Maybe a bit irked that DDG did not find it.

      DDG gets feedback on what to look for. Go through the search strings find the !g's and focus your results on finding those things as those are the holes in the system.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:09PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:09PM (#764817) Journal

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @06:55PM (#764886)

      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

        by isj (5249) on Wednesday November 21 2018, @07:22PM (#764905) Homepage

        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.