I was reading this story on Slate.com about the potential of law enforcement using people’s Google search to pre-empt crimes. Specifically, the woman in question searched for things like “ways to kill someone in their sleep” and “how to poison someone”
I’m no technie, but I seem to recall there were other, more secure search engines out there that doesn’t monitor or save search information by its users. But even if those exist, they would suffer from the lack of Google’s search algorithms. However, could a website take inputted search queries from its users, not keep any user records or data, search Google itself, spit back the results, and get all the benefits of a Google search without the potential privacy invasion? Does that sound illegal if they are piggybacking on Google’s search engine? What if they don’t identify that they’re using Google, but just use it and report the search results? There’s no law against another search engine using Google, right?
No, that’s not possible without a contract with Google. It probably is against the terms of service, so it’s not legal. And technically, it’s easy for Google to block.
Well, Scroogle was doing it, quite publicly, for about 9 years, and although they have now been closed down, perhaps in part thanks to Google blocking them (although Google apparently denies deliberately doing so: see Baron Greenback’s link), no legal action was ever taken.
Startpage is “enhanced” by Google. It’s an evolution of ixquick which was very private but not very effective. This new variation is much better. It doesn’t return as many results but that may be because it picks up ewer sponsored and re-directed sites. Google is heavily ad based and there are thousands of people working on methods for their site to appear in more Google results.
There’s also GoDuckGo which has more privacy than Google.
I am not following this. If I do a Google search am I somehow automatically bound to some terms of service even though I have not created a relationship with Google? That doesn’t make sense to me. And violating terms of service for a commercial agreement is not “not legal” as in “criminal” though it is subject to civil law but more likely just to result in termination of the agreement.
At least one search engine I once looked at is now just another gate to Google, although it doesn’t quite admit it. I once knew the founders and they would have been friends of the founders of Google since they were all grad students at Standford. They started this search engine, Cuil, as an alternative of Google, but I guess it failed. The portal still exists, though but it is Google all the way now. Presumably with Google’s knowledge and permission since of the founders of Cuil (possibly both) now works for Google.
I think the implication was that Let Me Google That For You is actually an example of a site doing that. Except it literally redirects you to actual google.com results so it’s not really an example.
It’s also possible RandomLetters wasn’t trying to be that clever…
www.startpage.com has already been mentioned and was created for that exact purpose. I keep wondering though if they are brazenly screwing Google or whether there is some kind of business relationship.
You could also take a look at www.dogpile.com which is a metasearch engine.
I think it’s a business relationship. That’s an official Google logo and it has a prominent position next to the input area. I tried to use the precursor IxQuick many times and it returned few results, so the Google hookup is welcome.
In the beginning, Google had a company motto of “Don’t be evil”. I think they’re sincere in that belief but recognize that they stepped over that line long ago when they found out they could make hellacious money. My interpretation of their presence on Startpage is that they atoning for their sins in a very small way (and making money at it).
As LMGTFY takes yo to a real Google results page, all your identifying data, which was waht the OP was concerned about, will be available to Google, just as if you had searched there normally. As you say, it is not really an example.