Search engine advice

[Delphinus]

Hi all,

I used to use Scroogle.org for my website searches and right now they've got a problem that needs to be fixed.

In the meantime, I find myself wanting to throw my computer out the window using "regular" search engine sites (Ask.com and Dogpile.com are the two I have used).

Does anyone have a favorite that really works?

Thanks.

[DaveJ]

1. I dunno but Scroogle looks nice, so far.

Never used it, but with the search terms I tried (like, javascript opacity chrome) the results are great.

[TrogL]

2. What's wrong with google?

[canetoad]

3. More info please

When you say 'my website searches' do you mean when YOU are searching for a site, or you want to put a search box on your website for users to search it?

[ConsAreLiars]

4. Scroogle is back up! (YAAAYYY!!!!) (nt)

[Earth Bound Misfit]

5. Did you see why they were down this time?

Houston, we have another problem...

This time it's not Google, and we need some malware sleuths to take a look at this page:
http://www.scroogle.org/botnote.html

Malware visits Scroogle.org

Google sucks Since June 24, 2010, www.scroogle.org has been visited by malware. This has nothing to do with Google itself, as none of these visits were passed to Google. This malware continues despite the shutdown of Scroogle, and our blocking continues because we would like to identify the source. After 11 days of this, we have blocks in place for 20,000 unique IPs from all over the world. This page is a summary of what we know about how this malware behaves.

It might be nearly impossible to identify the source of this malware. Our best guess is that a fairly popular website is infected by malware, and visitors to that site trigger the fetch to Scroogle from their own computer. We suspect that nothing is displayed at all, because we tried showing an alert page for a day, and then tried redirecting to a SWF file that played a sound for a day. Now we just redirect to a one-pixel GIF.

We don't think it is viral, and the visitor to the malware site might even have a clean computer. We are continuing to block as soon as we see this coming into Scroogle. At most, any particular IP address gets in only two quick hits before our nbbw.cgi program is able to place the block. However, even before we fine-tuned our blocking, we noticed that multiple hits from the same IP were the exception rather than the rule.

More at link.

Things that make you go Hmmmmm...

[ConsAreLiars]

6. That is a second problem, not the reason that Scroogle was disabled.

From: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/08/scroogle_back_from_dead_again/

Scroogle has once again returned from the dead, continuing to serve up its privacy-friendly Google search results after another programming tweak from founder Daniel Brandt.

Brandt and the not-for-profit Scroogle have been scraping Google search results since 2002, allowing netizens to use Mountain View's search engine without being tracked by the company. But in May, after Google removed an interface page where Brandt was scraping results, the service went offline. It returned a day later, as Brandt tapped a slightly different interface, only for this interface to vanish as well.

Originally, Brandt said he was unlikely to find another means of simply and reliably scraping Google, but he has now settled on a fix — though it's a bit more bloated than the old setup. "It's back up, and it looks like the old Scroogle to everyone. But I'm not a happy camper," he tells The Reg. "I finally spent two days reprogramming my parser in Scroogle...I do not like the extra bloat because the six dedicated servers I lease have monthly quotas for bandwidth."

Scroogle is run entirely with donations. You can support the cause here. (Link is to http://www.scroogle.org/donatesc.html )