Startpage

Quoting:Perhaps because as a re-packaged Google, Startpage is potentially vulnerable, as Scroogle was.

Quoting:It allows users to surf the web with complete privacy. The proxy lets users browse websites safely and anonymously, without passing on any private, personally identifiable information to the websites they view.

Quoting:For Scroogle, search results were "scraped," or automatically copied, from a specific Google search Web page (google.com/ie) designed to deliver results to people using Microsoft's outdated Internet Explorer 6 browser with the Google search toolbar.

The page was particularly suited for Scroogle, as it presented clean search results without ads and Google's universal search feature, which brings up other items such as news stories and YouTube videos, said Daniel Brandt, president of the nonprofit Public Information Research group and who runs Scroogle with donations.

But Google suddenly changed that page earlier this week in an effort to get people to upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer.

The change by Google didn't appear to be intentional, but it broke Scroogle.

Quoting:But by Tuesday evening, thanks to some help from a trio of Scroogle users, Brandt was able to replicate his setup via another page - google.com/search - by adding an extra parameter ("&output=ie") to the url. "It appears that both methods," Brandt says, meaning the old and the new, "amount to the same thing."

Quoting:Scroogle, the search engine operated by privacy militant and self-appointed Wikipedia watchdog Daniel Brandt, has folded for real. After enduring DDOS attacks “around the clock” that sent a flood of unsustainable traffic to his servers, Mr. Brandt took down the search engine along with his other four domains, namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com. His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.