The privacy problems on the internet are real, and scroogle may be worth looking at, but its not that easy. If the privacy problems were easy to fix then they might have gone away by now.


We can't "fix the search problem easily in just a few moments." A quick comparison of google and scroogle shows that there are many differences that make google more usable. For instance:

The google home page is dominated by a large search box surrounded by lots of white space. This makes it easy to perform searches. In contrast the scroogle home page does not contain a search box, instead having a link to something called "Scroogle scraper" and lots of other visual clutter. Clicking the link does give a fairly easy to use page, but it still has an apparently random colourd background and large random graphic. These both change each time you visit the page, causing distraction in something that should be a quick and easy task.

The google home and search results pages have links to other useful tools, such as maps, news, image, video searches and more. Scroogle doesn't.

Google offers a link to a cached version of each page in the search results, which is useful if the page goes offline. Scroogle doesn't.

Google offers about 800 results for 'foo'. Sometimes the results you want aren't on the first page. Scroogle offers a maximum of 100.

It's easy to bookmark any google search, and fairly easy to copy the URL into an email, chat etc to show it to someone else. None of these will generally work for a scroogle search. The scroogle search reults page instead has a link at the bottom labled "how to make a bookmark". However, clicking this leads to a page full of jargon filled text that attempts to educate people about a technical privacy related issue, interrupting their attempt to make a bookmark. I don't think most people would bother reading it. Only if you read all the way to the end are you presented with the opportunity to perform a search on scroogle that you can bookmark.

How many people actually use scroogle as their daily search engine of choice? I suspect that those that do tend to be both highly technology literate, and willing to make some sacrifice for better privacy.

There's always Ixquick -  https://www.ixquick.com/ - a real search engine as opposed to a scraper. For enhanced security I recommend accessing the internet via Firefox Portable Edition -  http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable - run from a flash drive via Portable TOR -  http://sourceforge.net/projects/portabletor/ - with all stored data encrypted with Free OTFE Explorer -  http://www.freeotfe.org/ - which does more or less everything Truecrypt does but is 100% portable and works without administrator privileges. As for social networks, well, anyone who is stupid enough to post personal data on the public internet is asking for trouble. You're better off using Freenet -  http://freenetproject.org/ - for sharing information though you do need some technical skill to use it.

I don't know who is behind Scroogle, so why should I trust them any more than I trust Google?

 http://scroogle.org

If you want privacy you really need something decentralised like Tor. It's not perfect but it's far better than putting all your trust in a third party:

 http://torproject.org

You should trust scroogle because you can read their source code. Check it out  http://www.scroogle.org/zipdir/nbbw.zip

I like my internets fast, do you actually use tor for day to day browsing ?!?

The code is here
 http://eugen.leitl.org/nbbw.zip

I'm not sure how much the source code for scroogle helps us trust them, as we still have to trust that the source code is genuine, and that they don't have any other software running alongside it that keeps logs.

Seems to boil down to if you trust them, you will trust their source code to be genuine and complete. If you don't trust them, you won't.