Scroogle unplugged for good this time

Not-for-profit search engine shuttered by creator

By Kelly Fiveash, 21st February 2012

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Scroogle - a not-for-profit search engine that offered users something of a pro-privacy antidote to Google - has been killed off by its creator.

Daniel Brandt called it quits after his servers were repeatedly targeted by DDoS attacks on Scroogle.

As we reported last week, the website was out of action and displaying a message during the most recent outage that blamed Google for "temporarily blocking" Scroogle's server.

It turns out the site, which routinely scraped the Chocolate Factory's search results for the best part of a decade, has been closed down by Brandt.

The final nail in the coffin came not because of action take by Google to once again attempt to banish the site from the interwebs, but due to the number of DDoS attacks that hit Scroogle, rendering the site utterly useless.

“Scroogle.org is gone forever,” Brandt told BetaBeat.

“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.” ®

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