Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 17 submissions in the queue.

Search Engine Findx Shuts Down

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

isj writes:

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This discussion has been archived.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.
Search Engine Findx Shuts Down | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 68 comments | Search Discussion
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: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:45AM

    by Pino P (4721) on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:45AM (#765026) Journal

    "While people are starting to understand the importance of privacy it is a major hurdle to get them to select a different search engine." - sure, if I've never heard of you.

    If you were running that business, how would you have advertised?

    That's what graph analysis is for, you only need suck in the HTML and index it.

    I thought Google LLC still had the exclusive license to the PageRank patent.

    "Monetizing is nearly impossible because advertising networks want to know everything about the users, going against privacy concerns." - Advertising is just one way to monetise. If you were relying on it, you picked a really bad business model.

    If you were running that business, how would you have raised revenue instead?

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