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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: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 21 2018, @08:21PM
My experience with Google isn't like that. When I do a Google search, my more-or-less relevant results are always close to 100%. (Sorry, I'm not doing the numbers to see just how close to 100%.) For starters, you block Google's ad servers at the router. Block adsense. Block googletagservices and googletagmanager and googleanalytics. Those google services which I want to use still work with all that crap blocked. I should probably take a screenshot of my Google searches, and post it somewhere for people to see. uBlock and uBlock origin are just two of the script blockers that offer to block that stuff for you.
My web surfing is, at a minimum, 85% ad free and tracker free. The advertising assholes ruined my internet experience almost two decades ago, and I started learning then how to stop that nonsense. In the time since then, I've actually taken ownership of my desktop, and my internet experience. Some of you may not be old enough to really appreciate MySpace. It was godawful horrible. Geocities had some crap that was nearly as bad. The wider internet was trying hard to be just as bad, with their insane banners, popups, popunders, etc ad nauseum. As I say, I took ownership, and blocked every bit of it.
Google is less glaringly horrible than most of that crap was. But, still, it's none of Google's business whether I like Rice Krispies, or Cocoa Puffs, or Wheaties. It is far less of their business what kind of car I drive, or where I shop for auto parts, or much of anything else. So, I prevent Google learning anything that I can prevent.
And, to top that all off - I'm not even paranoid. I know that Google isn't out to get me, and I don't worry about anything like that. I am simply aware that Google is a prying corporate entity, and I am also aware that I don't have to permit them to pry into my life.
But, I believe that Google's core - their search engine - is just about the best in the world. When anything or everything else fails me, I go to Google. If I can't find anything relevant with Google, then I presume that whatever I am looking for has been "sanitized", and I won't find it without some special insider help.