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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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 22 2018, @05:28AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 22 2018, @05:28AM (#765074) Journal

    I have only noted the fact of Opera's popularity in a specific region. I am a poor monolingual American, so I have zero ideas why those people like Opera over anything. I can only look on, and listen while others discuss the reasons. And, if the reasons were stated for me, clearly and succinctly, I probably still wouldn't understand.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Thursday November 22 2018, @08:50PM

    by legont (4179) on Thursday November 22 2018, @08:50PM (#765318)

    I did a little asking around. Yes, to my surprise, Opera was popular among "privacy conscious" folks of somewhat eastern origins. The most popular feature was built in free vpn. However, it was sold in 2016 to Chinese, who removed the feature so "sophisticated" users left.

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