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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: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:23PM (#764824)

    I switched to duckduckgo, and use it pretty much exclusively (I occasionally do a !g search if I'm desperate, but it rarely helps), for almost a decate now. I don't remember exactly when, and I don't remeber exactly what they did, but google was fucking around with the main search UI and I was not happy with it. I think at the time people were talking about ixquick and duckduckgo on the green site. I gave both a try for a while and liked duckduckgo better.

    I never looked back: Duckduckgo was offering pretty much exactly what got me using google almost exclusively in late 90s: a no-nonsense box to type words in and get no-nonsense results.

    This is literally the first time I have ever heard of findx, so it's doesn't surprise me that they had trouble getting people to switch.

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