Using the Scroogle Search Box

Scroogle is a web site which anonymizes Google queries. Since Google keeps a copy of queries, there are privacy concerns with performing queries on Google. There is no evidence that Google is handing personal search data over to the authorities without search warrants. However, that data is clearly of interest and it may only be a matter of time before it is seized or exploited. It is a fact that warrantless government access has already happened with some of the phone companies and there is now (late 2007) legislation proposed to legalize this action after the fact.

This Scroogle search box is cleaner than the equivalent Google HTML code. I wanted as minimal a look as I could get, independent of the data archiving issue.

Scroogle search (an untraceable anti-Google)

Here is the code used on my home page for this search. It was taken from the Scroogle web site and modified to format it as shown in the illustration above.

<h1>Mark Bell</h1>
<right><FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi">
<INPUT type=text name="Gw" SIZE="25" MAXLENGTH="225">
<INPUT type="submit" value="Search">
<INPUT type=hidden name="n" value="2">
&nbsp; &nbsp;
<INPUT type=radio name="d" value="www.csun.edu/~mb326958%20OR%20site:nhps.us" CHECKED>This Site
&nbsp; &nbsp; <INPUT type=radio name="d" value="*">
web &nbsp;
</FORM>
</right>

The code in red is hand coded. I started with the Scroogle example and observed what queries it generated. From that I was able to piece together this code that returns searches from either of two web sites I run. The OR is a Google term; the %20's were needed to make embedded spaces work in the Scroogle query.

If you do use Google Gadgets, it is more configurable. You can create more than two web sites OR'd in a search. I couldn't do that with the code above (it ran into a character length limitation). I think what Google's gadget does is create a special link to a stored query in Google. This appears to be true because the query code itself does not show the searched-for web sites in plaintext.