Free Republic

Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show. “Don’t be evil” has been part of the company’s corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, “do the right thing.” However, Google retained its original “don’t be evil” language until the past several weeks. The...

Scroogle - a not-for-profit search engine that offered users something of a pro-privacy antidote to Google - has been killed... Daniel Brandt (its creator), called it quits after his servers were repeatedly targeted by DDoS attacks on Scroogle. (NOT) Google to once again attempt to banish the site from the interwebs, but.... a number of DDoS attacks that hit Scroogle, rendering the site utterly useless. “Scroogle.org is gone forever,” Brandt told BetaBeat. “Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google’s throttling, (DATE SORT) and was already dying. It might have...

For Google, it's personal. The Internet search giant is no longer going to roll out the same search results to everyone. Starting Tuesday, Google will pluck only the results most relevant to you --and not just from billions of Web pages but from the personal stuff that you and your connections privately share. The idea, says Google Fellow Amit Singhal, is that Google now searches your world, not just the Web, and serves up results that combine both for your eyes only. "Your world was missing from search until now," he said. "We are bringing your world into search."

Scroogle is back, once again serving up privacy-friendly Google search results, a day after a sudden change to google.com shut down the swashbuckling service. The not-for-profit Scroogle stopped working on Monday, when Mountain View removed the interface page - google.com/ie - where it was scraping search results. Speaking with The Reg on Tuesday morning, Scroogle operator Daniel Brandt said he expected the service could not be revived because ....

Scroogle, the privacy-friendly Google scraper, has been crippled by changes to one of the dominant search engine's interface pages. The unheralded alterations to google.com/ie yesterday could mean Scroogle has to be "permanently retired", its operator Daniel Brandt wrote. "Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it," he added. The Register contacted Google for comment this morning but we haven't...

From Scroogle (enter a search term, hit enter, and this is the message you'll see....) We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002. This interface was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every...

A couple weeks back, I expressed on this forum my curiousity about how jkffjkff is enjoying the man for whom he cast his unquestionably genuine ballot for president. The point was to highlight how little of such obviously fraudulent ACORN activity is Scroole.org is a screen scraper for Google; I highly recommend it. It will return the first page of results. Scroogle (or Google if privacy is no concern to you) "bamster". What might you expect to see? Am I living in a parallel universe or am I not alone in seeing the obvious discepency between this obviously Obamaesque nickname...