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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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confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 4, Funny) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:15PM (5 children)
Now that Google seems intent of destroying the utility of their web search DDG is getting a lot closer to parody with them.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:23PM
I switched to duckduckgo, and use it pretty much exclusively (I occasionally do a !g search if I'm desperate, but it rarely helps), for almost a decate now. I don't remember exactly when, and I don't remeber exactly what they did, but google was fucking around with the main search UI and I was not happy with it. I think at the time people were talking about ixquick and duckduckgo on the green site. I gave both a try for a while and liked duckduckgo better.
I never looked back: Duckduckgo was offering pretty much exactly what got me using google almost exclusively in late 90s: a no-nonsense box to type words in and get no-nonsense results.
This is literally the first time I have ever heard of findx, so it's doesn't surprise me that they had trouble getting people to switch.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday November 21 2018, @07:12PM (2 children)
"closer to parody" hehe
But the problem I have with DDG is its image search is even more useless than Bing.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday November 22 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
I've actually found Bing's image search to be pretty decent. One of the problems with DDG's is that it seems to be hard-coded to only give you like the first 150 images it finds no matter how many it actually finds. Google's reverse image search is one of the very few things I'll use Google for anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @03:39AM
I use tineye.com for that. It works without Javascript :)
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Thursday November 22 2018, @03:05PM
s/parody/parity/