I posted a note about scroogle back in January. Scroogle offered an SSL interface to the google engine, and, moreover, didn’t lumber its users with google cookies and sundry other irritations. Since then, however, google themselves have started to offer an SSL interface and, coincidentally, scroogle seem to have started to have some problems.
If you visit the scroogle SSL interface, you get a redirect to a notice which explains why some changes made at google mean that scroogle can no longer work properly. Scroogle managed to get a workaround in place for a few days, but it seems that another google change has finally killed that too unless google can be convinced to help out – unlikely in my view. The scroogle redirect page (dated 1 July 2010) has the following line from Daniel Brandt:
“Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don’t hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers.”
That in itself is bad enough, but as a separate new posting explains, scroogle now seems to be the target of a botnet aimed at swamping its servers. As Brandt goes on to say:
“Google has a few hundred thousand servers, while Scroogle has six. They can put up with sites that spread malware, but our bandwidth is limited. Even if Google relents and the output=ie interface returns, this Scroogle malware problem could still be increasing at that point. Eventually it alone might shut down Scroogle.”
Sad. I hate to see the little guy lose out.
