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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.


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  • (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?

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  • (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.