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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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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday November 22 2018, @06:38PM (1 child)
It's not that difficult because there's a lot of search engines out there that do better than Google. I will grant that Google has the problem of being the search engine that everyone games with their spammy SEO tricks, but even Bing is on par or better than Google for a lot of searches.
Though I don't demand anything of Google. I'll just use those other search engines instead.
It's probably not as big of a problem as you think. My guess is a handful of servers run most of the spammy link farms out there. You block those and you'd make a big difference. Of course you'd have the long tail to deal with and you'd never totally eliminate the problem, but for little effort I bet they could make a pretty good dent in it.
Google could also throw their weight around too. If there are specific hosting companies or IP blocks that seemed to host a large number of spammy sites, just downrank every site that's hosted there. I bet that would fix the problem real quick.
(Score: 2) by isj on Thursday November 22 2018, @08:39PM
Sounds like your hands have thousands of fingers. You freak :-)
On a more serious note: There is quite a bit more than a few spam/seo/link-farm/... sites and operators. Think how many clandestine SEO companies there are. There are at least as many operators of link farms.
A small organisation, substandard.org, identified several link sites / pagerank-aggregation sites just for the Danish ccTLD. Some links were using link text go boost ranking of sites offering competing products etc. One of them a large retail chain. It is illegal to use link farms in Denmark (simplification) so they of course reported those link farms to the appropriate authorities. Soon after substandard.org it got DDOSed. I think they are still DDOSes now, 1½ year later. So someone doesn't like it if you bring down link-farms.