Script Summary: Privacy-assured web searching was never prettier or more usable!
Version: 1.7
Copyright: 2008-2010 by Adam Katz
License: AGPL v3+
There are three main features provided here:
- Bookmarkable URLs when in SSL mode (but still safe, secure, and private).
- Display beautified, now it looks almost exactly like Google (see screenshots).
- Helper links added for cache, similar links, history, and translations.
A quick overview of Scroogle - this is an anonymizer service which prevents Google, Inc. from connecting your searches to you. They wipe logs religiously, there are no cookies, etc. Using SSL also means nobody can read your traffic and note your search queries. Learn more at www.scroogle.org or the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Google FAQ.
Original Scroogle | Scroogle with this script |
 | Compare to the same search on Google |
Here is a demo of search details, showing query highlighting, nonstandard file type recognition, special treatment for PDFs, translation pop-up, and indented secondary hits from a domain.
Privacy Notes
If using SSL, this script makes search refinements also SSL (not the default!). Also, SSL makes it safe to use GET (the referring URL is not sent via SSL*), which makes it easier to bookmark and share search links, recover crashed sessions, and find old searches in your browser history, all with no risk to your privacy. If not using SSL, it is not safe to use GET. We use POST to ensure privacy, which means you will not be able to bookmark or recover searches.
* SSL-to-SSL links actually pass referer information, which is a privacy issue. This script now intercepts all such links and presents them through a javascript redirector to prevent passing referer headers. See update log and its corresponding comments below (dated 10-22-08).
Quick Search
You can change your search-bar to use Scroogle by clicking on Scroogle SSL on the Mycroft Project, after which you can make it your default search by going to about:config and filtering for search., then copying the string for browser.search.selectedEngine to browser.search.defaultenginename.
If you're like me, you consider the search bar redundant; you can use the "quick search" function of bookmark shortcuts instead: Add a bookmark to https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=%s and give the bookmark a keyword like "s" or "search" for quick searching, so that you can type "s this is a search query" into your location bar (you can then remove the search bar in favor of a wider location bar).
Translations
Translation links are offered for search results hosted at domains using country codes (we would otherwise need more complicated logic, which would likely require actually visiting each result, an issue for both bandwidth and privacy). It pops up because some countries speak multiple languages (for example, Switzerland and Belgium each speak three languages). Translations use Yahoo's Babelfish, offering translations from Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (simplified or traditional), Japanese, and Korean. Google Translate offers several additional languages which may be added in the future.
| Reminder! SSL queries are more CPU-intensive on Scroogle's servers, so please Donate to Scroogle to keep the service running. |
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Update Log
- 2008-03-20 (minor) 0.2
- Better rendering of pages with no hits. Purely cosmetic.
- 2008-09-16 (major) 0.4
- Added cache links for full Google mimicry.
- 2008-09-23 (major) 0.6
- Big improvement of insertion code and Google look-and-feel, market-watch image.
- 2008-09-24,25 (minor) 0.7, 0.8
- Folded in suggestions implemented in icepick's fork, added "Similar Pages" (like Google), "History" (like CustomizeGoogle), removed extra indentation and numbering, other minor tweaks.
- 2008-10-03 (major) 0.9-0.13
- Indentation for subsequent hits within the same domain (like Google), PDF support (as requested by icepick) via Flash reader PdfMeNot and Google (I renamed the standard cache link), PDF links now have icons. I also bumped the license to AGPLv3.
- 2008-10-10 (major) 1.0
- Translation now included! Also improved highlighting color, added acknowledgment of other non-browser-friendly formats (now featuring PDF, RTF, DOC, and PPT). I decided PDF was by far the most popular, so only it gets an icon (unless there is other demand); it's hard to find an icon that is compatible with the (A)GPL, and it might take up too much space. This version is pretty much feature-complete and stable, so this becomes version 1.0 instead of 0.14. I'm going to adhere to a strict versioning system from here on, using major versions for big changes (UI, features) and minor versions for smaller changes (bug fixes and tweaks).
- 2008-10-16 (minor) 1.1
- Wider inputs, now also with spellcheck enabled. Screen shots updated.
- 2008-10-22 (security) 1.2
- Privacy fix to prevent sending referer data to SSL links (SSL-to-SSL). More detail in my archived comment on the subject.
- 2009-08-20 (minor) 1.3
- Efficiency upgrade partially inspired by JoeSimmons's time tests plus independent tests. Hopefully not negligible. Also some minor tweaks on code legibility, optimized regexes, links at bottom. Marketwatch logo is now fully contained in one contiguous portion of the source, making it easy to remove if you prefer.
- 2009-10-16 (minor) 1.4
- Fixed a small bit of bad code (error thrown to user instead of console, source of error fixed), migrated all images to base64 for direct inclusion rather than muddying SSL connections with non-SSL media.
- 2010-10-04 (minor) 1.5
- Replacement logo (for Zeriam, Srendo, Skreew, Sarris), cosmetic entry page fixes (for epicureo), removed extraneous blurb quotes (for qsx), CSS -moz-opacity() is now opacity(), bugfix regarding google-defanged results, minor efficiency tweaks. I 'shopped the scrooge-in-mountainview logo to clean it up and shrink it and now render the "Scroogle" text.
- 2010-10-04 (minor) 1.6
- PdfMeNot was apparently awesome enough to be bought by Google. For now, I'll keep it using that Google-based service. Edited link to make it work, enabled conversion on all (known) supported document formats. Also tweaked colors on logo text to look more like Google's.
- 2010-10-06 (minor) 1.7
- Workaround for Scroogle bug regarding "next 100" matches, which fails to acknowledge on GET requests (for GreaseGuy via Issues page), fixed bug that failed to account for previous hits on such pages.
