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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: 2) by legont on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:27AM (2 children)

    by legont (4179) on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:27AM (#765020)

    So, Google degraded to the old time Yahoo?

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
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  • (Score: 2) by isj on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:43AM (1 child)

    by isj (5249) on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:43AM (#765024) Homepage

    Not exactly. From what I can gather they use their ultra-secret ranking algorithm, but then validate/fine-tune it with human reviewers.

    • (Score: 2) by legont on Thursday November 22 2018, @02:30AM

      by legont (4179) on Thursday November 22 2018, @02:30AM (#765044)

      This sounds like an old school censorship to me. No wonder politicians are demanding it bent one way or another. Once they started doing it, any authorities request is reasonable.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.