There's been a lot in the news lately about search engine privacy, so I thought for a quick project it might be interesting to make a site that doesn't allow the search engines to track you. It's still alpha quality, but please take a look and give me some feedback. Thanks.
http://www.flyvault.com/safesearch
Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
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Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#2It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google, but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#3It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google, but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.
Why is this legal? I thought Google no longer has a search api.
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#4It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google, but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.
Isn't that against their terms of service or something?
How's this different/better from some kind of anonymizing proxy like tor?
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#5Awesome! It's better, faster, nicer looking than Scroogle.org
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#6It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google, but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.
Why is this legal? I thought Google no longer has a search api.
The thing is, we're not making money from it in any way (which is why I call it a pseudo' startup), and because of that fair use can apply. Also, think about google. They scrape the entire web and profit by serving that as content...
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#7It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google, but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.
Isn't that against their terms of service or something? How's this different/better from some kind of anonymizing proxy like tor?
With things like tor, it can be a little slower, especially if you just want to do a single search. With this, we've added in the feature so you can add it to your Firefox/IE7 search box and then easily use it right from the browser. So it's the same idea, we're just focusing on this one feature for the good of the community.
The other feature we have is endless scrolling, so if you search and can't find it in the first few results, you can just keep scrolling and we'll continue to populate it. That's something not many others have.
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this legal? I thought Google no longer has a search api.
The thing is, we're not making money from it in any way (which is why I call it a pseudo' startup), and because of that fair use can apply. Also, think about google. They scrape the entire web and profit by serving that as content...
Fair use certainly doesn't apply. You're using Google search technology (which btw, involves a bit more than 'scraping' the web) and stripping out the ads (their source of revenue). Expect a cease and desist letter soon.
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#9Instead of giving our private information to Google to use for 18 months, we are giving it to you to use indefinitely?
Where is your privacy policy?
And, what is your hosting provider's policy? I found out recently that my hosting provider refused to make any guarantees; that means that I cannot make any guarantees either, since my hosting provider has full access to my server.
Re: Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
#10Instead of giving our private information to Google to use for 18 months, we are giving it to you to use indefinitely? Where is your privacy policy? And, what is your hosting provider's policy? I found out recently that my hosting provider refused to make any guarantees; that means that I cannot make any guarantees either, since my hosting provider has full access to my server.
A privacy policy is very high on my list of things to do, along with an explanation of how it works so that people can feel confident in their privacy. Right now, the only thing I record is a SHA1 has of everyone's IP address and a timestamp so that I can track how many unique people have used it. With the SHA1 hash, there's no (very difficult) way to trace that back to the user. I'm also talking to my host about the web server logs and how quickly those can be purged.