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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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It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.
(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.