OMG DNS!, replied by MichaelMichael

MichaelMichael — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 05:21:46 +0000

I finally traced down serious problems I was having with my internet connection to this plugin. Making it's links to cached web pages (nyud.net) and what-the-heck else it's doing (preloading pages? I have no idea), it's making hundreds of DNS requests for every search done. This actually floods my DNS server, as seen in Wireshark, and therefore prevents pages from loading. I was getting 404s every 3 or four minutes before I disabled this script. I went back in and edited out the parts creating cached links and so far (ten minutes in to testing) it seems to be doing better.

Archived Comments, replied by khopesh

khopesh — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:52:09 +0000

I'm flattered that you liked my script enough to fork it!

Some responses to this script: I chose not to link the wayback machine because, for the most part, things that need it are so old that they are no longer indexed by the upstream search engine (google). I also chose to put the cache links up top by the title because the title is truncated whereas the URL is not, so it can end up getting quite wide, and sites that share scroogle or one of the caches are purposefully skipped in my version, though I've considered removing that. I like the g hanging down into the blue bar at the top (see my version's screenshot), but I can see reason for distaste on that front .. maybe my next update will look more like yours. I'll take your other tweaks into consideration for v0.7, whenever I do that.

As to v0.5 and v0.6 -- I've cleaned up the code considerably since you forked it, including adding a market-watch image to the bottom, better/cleaner/google-ier CSS, and (more importantly) better insertion code. (Note, my screenshots are two versions out of date.)

Update: I've implemented this in v0.7 of my script, http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/23529, assigning credit here. I decided that the way such super-long URLs wrap is fine anyways. Wayback Machine was added as "history" (just like in the CustomizeGoogle add-on).

Update 2008-10-05: You state in your description "At the time of writing, SSL in Firefox does not result does not blank the referer, as claimed. Improved Scroogle's privacy improvement comes from the removal of GET-based features from the original script." <snip>

Update 2008-10-22: In the case of SSL-to-SSL transactions (only), that linked page is indeed incorrect, as noted by icepick on my script's comments; referer data is passed. I have altered my script to ensure that SSL-to-SSL transactions are masked so as to avoid sending referer data. Since this script (Improved Scroogle) uses POST, the query is not sent in the referer header, but the scroogle.org domain is, and you can't bookmark searches.

Archived Comments, replied by Jesse Andrews

Jesse Andrews — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 01:05:36 +0000

The following is an archive of comments made before threaded discussions was implemented (November 16th, 2008)

Discussion on Improved Scroogle | Userscripts.org

OMG DNS!, replied by MichaelMichael

Archived Comments, replied by khopesh

Archived Comments, replied by Jesse Andrews