Service for Private Google Searches Shuts Down

A service that allowed users to search Google without having their queries tracked has shut down after Google changed the site that the service was using to get results, the service said Tuesday.

But Google said the site was never intended to be used for scraping of results and that changes were made for reasons unrelated to the service, called Scroogle.

The Scroogle project raised concerns about privacy and tracking amid the ubiquity of Google search. Its potential demise also highlights the problems that services face when building their products to rely on other companies, especially if those companies don’t benefit.

Scroogle, which scraped results from a simplified version of Google formerly found at http://www.google.com/ie, touted its service as a way to maintain privacy while searching Google. Some privacy advocates have questioned the search engine’s ability to log users’ internet-protocol addresses, which are used to identify computers, and record people’s search histories.

There are other services that allow users to search without such tracking; Googlesharing.net, for example, uses a Firefox add-on to direct Google searches through a proxy site so that Google can’t associate the information with a particular user. And search engine ixquick.com promises not to install trackers called cookies or to log users’ IP addresses. The site also pledges to delete user data within two days.

In a post on its site, Daniel Brandt, who runs Scroogle, said his site would likely be shut down for good unless another simplified version of Google was made available. “Google’s main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible,” he wrote. He said other simplified sites, such as google.com/m, did not provide results that were simple enough for Scroogle scraping either.

A Google spokesman said the site that Scroogle was using was intended to fit within the sidebar feature of Internet Explorer 6 and that it is being phased out along with Google support for IE6 in general. Users who had IE6 with the Google Toolbar installed and Google selected as their default search engine could get results in a bar on the side of their browser, and these results needed to remain simple because of space and other limitations.

But “due to significant decrease in usage, we discontinued this interface and are encouraging searchers to upgrade their browser,” the spokesman said. The site now directs users to download IE8. Google also has been discontinuing its support of IE6 elsewhere and urging users to upgrade to newer browsers.