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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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innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @09:06PM
OK, I'm in. Where do I sign up to help curate?
I'd be happy to check the special interest sites that I visit often, maybe even one or two others that were randomly assigned. I'd even be happy to send some data back--for example, I use EFF's Privacy Badger which reports # of trackers, could pass that number along to the database.
How will shills be kept out? One bad apple (a curator paid to plug certain sites) could poison the database... No one wants another Yelp (uggggh).
The searx project could be a good source for code -- they are set up for anyone to host their own instance.
Can you