Gnome switches to DuckDuckGo

@vagabondo,

Scroogle was never actually "blocked" by Google, or so the claims go. I'll begin with the May 2010 interruption of Scroogle's scraping. Quoting from PCWorld,

Quoting:For Scroogle, search results were "scraped," or automatically copied, from a specific Google search Web page (google.com/ie) designed to deliver results to people using Microsoft's outdated Internet Explorer 6 browser with the Google search toolbar.

The page was particularly suited for Scroogle, as it presented clean search results without ads and Google's universal search feature, which brings up other items such as news stories and YouTube videos, said Daniel Brandt, president of the nonprofit Public Information Research group and who runs Scroogle with donations.

But Google suddenly changed that page earlier this week in an effort to get people to upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer.

The change by Google didn't appear to be intentional, but it broke Scroogle.

After Google's interface changed, several Scroogle users offered new methods for scraping Google's content. From TheRegister's account,

Quoting:But by Tuesday evening, thanks to some help from a trio of Scroogle users, Brandt was able to replicate his setup via another page - google.com/search - by adding an extra parameter ("&output=ie") to the url. "It appears that both methods," Brandt says, meaning the old and the new, "amount to the same thing."

As I said, that was in May of 2010 when Google changed its interface and Scroogle "broke". As I recall, there were more episodes where a Google interface change required Scroogle to do some reconnoitering in order to resume its "service". Scroogle "closed its doors" in February of 2012. According to BetaBeat,

Quoting:Scroogle, the search engine operated by privacy militant and self-appointed Wikipedia watchdog Daniel Brandt, has folded for real. After enduring DDOS attacks “around the clock” that sent a flood of unsustainable traffic to his servers, Mr. Brandt took down the search engine along with his other four domains, namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com. His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.

A net search for "scroogle blocked" and for "scroogle closed" will turn up variations of the same stories. Hope that helps.