SoylentNews

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.

Original Submission