Scroogle Founder Pulls The Plug, Closes Website

Scroogle was one of the sites that came up occasionally here on Ghacks as an alternative to Google Search. It basically provided access to Google Search results through a proxy to protect the privacy of its users. In this regard, it was more of a Google proxy than a search engine. Daniel Brandt, the creator of Scroogle, established the service in April 2003, and it has ever since been available online. Things turned for the worse in recent years when Google started to block – and unblock – the search engine from accessing its servers.

Many users suspected foul play here, while Google denied the allegations and stated that automated spam protection scripts were responsible for the blocking. That was unfortunate but a situation that most Scroogle users were willing to live with.

In February 2012, things started to heat up once again when Google started to block the service’s access to their servers more regularly. That hurt the service considerably and made it less usable than before.

Scroogle servers on top of that were harassed by DDoS (denial of service) attacks that started back in December. Daniel Brandt decided to pull the plug on Scroogle, and all other domain names he owned, as of yesterday. Domains were not only taken offline content wise, but also in the domain name system (DNS) to protect the server providers from further DDoS attacks on their infrastructure.

Users who try to access the Scroogle website now will receive a site not found error. The other domain names that were taken down are: namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com.

Brandt told BetaBeat that he would have had to close down Scroogle even without the DDoS attacks due to Google’s traffic throttling.

With Scroogle being taken off the grid, where should privacy valuing users go to for their searches now? The two search engines that come to mind are DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com

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Popular Bittorrent Website BTJunkie Closes Its Doors

Users of the popular Bittorrent indexing website BTJunkie who try to access the site’s content in a web browser are not seeing the usual site layout, but a goodbye message instead. The message states that the site operators have decided to close down the service voluntarily after more than seven years of operation.

No reason other than that is provided, but it is likely that the decision is linked to recent events, in particular the Pirate Bay case in Sweden where founders of the site recently lost the final appeal and are looking at prison time, and the Megaupload takedown and the fallout that followed.

The announcement on the BTJunkie website reads:

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

BTJunkie, according to Alexa web statistics, was one of the top 400 Internet websites that was visited by millions of visitors per month. Much of the appeal of the site came from the fact that all of the site’s contents were publicly accessible.

It is likely that users, after a moment of grieving, will move on to other popular Bttorrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Kat.ph, or private Bittorrent sites that require an invitation to get access to the site’s contents. The very same sites have also benefited recently from the closure of Megaupload and other file hosting websites.

BTJunkie users who feel lost right now should check out the threads over at Reddit and Torrentfreak for a list of alternative sites.

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