What is Scroogle?

Did you know that you can delete most spam and blogs by adding -com to your search terms? Scroogle does. No cookies. No search-term records. Access log deleted within 48 hours.

Scroogle, a proxy search engine, is a self proclaimed Google arch-nemesis. Campaigning for internet search freedom and liberty, Scroogle allows surfs to search minus the Big Brother Monkey on your back. Scroogle enables Wi-Fi internet user to surf securely. Scroogle cuts down on the profiling of service providers. If you use the internet while at work, Scroogle will eliminate your employer's ability to monitor your web surfing. This stealth-mode search leader is a big hit among youngsters who use public computers.

For Scroogle, SSL is used to hide your search terms from anyone who might be monitoring traffic between your browser and Scroogle's servers. This encryption happens when you send your search terms to Scroogle, and it also happens when Scroogle sends the results of your search back to you. No one snooping between your browser and Scroogle can figure out what you were looking for, because the information is encrypted and looks like gibberish. The connection between Scroogle and Google, which still must happen for every search, is not encrypted because Google doesn't use SSL. However, this connection is not associated with you at that point, and only Scroogle knows who entered those search terms. Your IP address is dropped before your search terms are sent to Google.

Most employers monitor the websites visited by their employees. There are impressive "employer spyware" packages such as Websense that they use to do this. Because the GET method is preferred by almost all search engines (see this page), even if the employer sees only the web address that you used to arrive at Google, he already knows the search terms you requested. With a record of all the search terms you've used while you were at work, each with a date and time recorded in his log, your employer has a pretty good idea of what you've been thinking. There are no laws that prevent employers from doing this sort of snooping.

If you use Wi-Fi and you haven't set up your router for secure operation, your neighbors could see what you are doing on the web. Again, your search terms might be interesting to them.

In some countries, the government could be monitoring your web activity by requiring your service provider to log the sites you visit, and make the logs available on demand. In fact, most governments wouldn't even have to ask the service provider for this information. They could tap the line upstream of the provider, and just look for packets containing www.google.com/search. Next to this are your search terms in plain text, with your IP address in the same packet. Government spies salivate at the thought of data-mining this information. With your search terms revealing what you are thinking, and the email you send revealing your network of associates, that's almost everything they need to know about you.

Besides encrypting everything between your browser and Scroogle, there are other details that may interest you about SSL. We prefer the POST method over the GET method, but if you use SSL, even the GET method is secure. You will see the Scroogle address and the search terms in your browser address bar with the GET method only because the browser displays this before it starts the SSL negotiation with Scroogle. Those search terms don't go any further than your browser. The SSL in your browser strips off the portion of the URL after the question mark, and then provides this information to Scroogle only after the secure connection has been established.

When the Scroogle results come back from an SSL search, and you click on any of the links shown on that secure page, there is another advantage. SSL does not allow the browser to record the address where that secure page came from, and attach it to any outgoing links on that page. Normally all browsers do this, and it's called the "referrer" address. But SSL blanks out the referrer, so that any site you click on from a Scroogle SSL page won't even know that you arrived at their site from Scroogle. The referrer will be blank, and your log entry will look like any of the hundreds of bots that crawl the web all day and night with similar blank referrers.

All of these are good reasons to use Scroogle's SSL option. It increases the load on our servers because the encryption handshaking is complex, but so far it hasn't been a problem for us. If it does become a problem, we hope to get more donations so that we can add more servers.

Time is Money: PCMag.com Names the Fastest ISPs in America

Nevada, Virginia and Pennsylvania Have the Fastest Internet Service—
In a world where time equals money, slow Internet connections have real-life business and quality-of-life implications. Fiber optic connections have proven themselves the fastest way online, but they're still rare—and expensive. Which Internet service providers (ISPs) offer the fastest broadband? And in which state? After conducting over 200,000 individual tests as part of its third annual study, PCMag.com found that Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic connections are indeed the fastest overall service, and Cablevision's Optimum Online proved itself the fastest cable ISP in the United States. Likewise, Nevada, Virginia, and Pennsylvania are home to the fastest surf speeds—the full state ranking is below. PCMag.com’s “Best ISPs in America” list hits PCMag.com on December 2.

To uncover the nation’s best ISPs, PCMag utilized the custom-designed SurfSpeed application (a utility that grabs pages from several popular Web sites to measure actual Internet surfing speed) and pored through data from over 17,000 profiles (that is, unique IP addresses).

Cable vs. DSL: DSL and cable lines were for a time synonymous in people’s minds, but cable has clearly taken off in terms of sheer speed. Cable connections are 47 percent faster than DSLs. Cablevision’s Optimum Online tops the list, with an average nationwide SurfSpeed of 839 Kbps. And 61 percent of users declared themselves satisfied with the service. Even the slowest cable service provider (Earthlink, averaging 565 Kbps) was faster than some DSL providers, from CenturyTel at 520 Kbps down to Alltell’s measly 357. FrontierNet is the fastest DSL provider in the nation, averaging SufSpeeds of 724 Kbps. And, perhaps most importantly, just 27 percent of DSL users reported themselves satisfied.

State by State: Analyzing regions offers insight and challenges, but the region with the fastest Internet service—the West—is just 14 Kbps faster than the slowest, the South at 551 Kbps. The difference between states, on the other hand, is shocking, with No. 1 Nevada offering residents Internet more than twice as fast as bottom-ranked New Mexico.

The PCMag Fastest ISPs in America 2008 - State Ranking:

Ranking State SurfSpeed (Kbps)
1 Nevada 781
2 Virginia 765
3 Pennsylvania 747
4 New Jersey 727
5 Connecticut 716
6 New York 714
7 Nebraska 707
8 Oklahoma 695
9 Massachusetts 695
10 Maryland 691
11 Illinois 681
12 Georgia 679
13 California 666
14 Oregon 665
15 Delaware 646
16 Washington 625
17 New Hampshire 615
18 Minnesota 609
19 Texas 605
20 Ohio 600
21 North Dakota 593
22 Colorado 564
23 Florida 562
24 South Dakota 560
25 Alabama 556
26 Kentucky 547
27 Michigan 544
28 Missouri 539
29 North Carolina 534
30 Kansas 528
31 Indiana 524
32 Utah 517
33 Rhode Island 516
34 Arizona 505
35 Tennessee 474
36 Louisiana 470
37 Idaho 461
38 South Carolina 457
39 Montana 455
40 Maine 427
41 West Virginia 417
42 Mississippi 413
43 Arkansas 405
44 Arizona 402
45 Wisconsin 402
46 Iowa 398
47 Vermont 391
48 Wyoming 379
49 Hawaii 378
50 New Mexico 322
National avg 557