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“Scroogle.org Is Gone Forever” Says Site Owner

Barry Schwartz on February 21, 2012 at 11:57 am

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

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 SEM topics.