"Scroogle.org Is Gone Forever" Says Site Owner

“Scroogle.org Is Gone Forever” Says Site Owner

Feb 21, 2012 at 11:57am ET by Barry Schwartz

A week ago, we reported that Scroogle was being blocked by Google and searches on the privacy search engine were no longer working. Since then, the site continued not to work and now it is completely offline.

The owner, Daniel Brandt, said he took it down “forever.” He blames both Google and DDOS attack by someone or a group of people who had a personal vendetta with him. He said even if the DDOS attack did not happen, Scroogle would only have lasted an additional 6 months due to Google’s throttling and squeezing of the service.

Daniel told BetaBeat.com:

Scroogle.org is gone forever. Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google’s throttling, and was already dying. It might have lasted another six months if I hadn’t lost seven servers from DDoS, but that’s about all.

He explained:

I no longer have any domains online. I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers.

I am a bit surprised the service is offline, it has been available since 2003 and has been through tough times with both Google and attacks.

Of course, Google could have shut it down at any moment, but has decided to simply throttle it instead of completely blocking it. Daniel Brandt is known to be an individual who is extremely anti Google’s practices. He blames Google for the site being offline but in reality, it seems he has other enemies.

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About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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La Neige d’Antan

Please, lets not be naive…

“Of course, Google could have shut it down at any moment, but has decided to simply throttle it instead of completely blocking it.”

Really? And expose itself as the megalomaniac – and yes, evil – ogre it really is?
Of course not. Any good propagandist will tell you that squeezing and throttling is the way to go.

Google’s zenith is over. And if they don’t know that, they must be really more stupid than even I thought.
Yes, there are a LOT of so called “sheeple” in this world.
But there are also a LOT of those who are not and who are willing to DO something against what they dislike.
I am one.
I MIGHT use Google only is the life of someone very dear to me really – literally – depended on it. Until it doesn’t… no way.
http://sillama1.xanga.com Silvia Wilson

The content, the short story “Scroogled” still exists on multiple websites in numerous translations as well as the original English. I copied this comment from the craphound site:
(also checked, and the links both work)

Russ Hunt says:

October 15, 2009 at 7:30 am

I’ve just shared this story with Kate Hunt, my daughter, whom you met at the Ottawa Writers’ Festival (she didn’t know of it). But in order to do it I reformatted the HTML — the version at http://craphound.com/scroogled.html is just about unreadable. If you’d like you can take the reformatted version I put up for her: I think it’s more readable. It’s here:

http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/scroogled.htm

(Not linked from anywhere; I haven’t clawed my way through all the creative commons bumph at the bottom of the text . . . ).

– Russ
http://profile.yahoo.com/MIS2FN7NHNLAVKHKTH6WVBXDVQ nettsight

Let the google scrapper ‘clone wars’ begin! :)~