If you were a scroogle user, then you already know how useful tool it was,for those of you who do not know, scroogle allowed you to search without your own bias and preference, meaning you got more better view of your ranking. If you search your own site in google, Google gives it more preferential treatment for your own site, having search and worked on it. For example, if I were to search for “Home Business Ideas” in google my site would come up much higher ranking on my computer, compare to say someone else truly searching for home business ideas search. It would be inflated ego boost to see my site ranking higher but it would not be right ranking. So if you want a unbiased ranking, scroogle was a great and free alternative to other paid services that many Internet marketer used.
I have been relying on scroogle to find out my site ranking for free. Yes, you can find your website ranking with market samurai or other paid tool, but scroogle did that perfectly with ease and simpleness to use for anyone.
I knew once in a while scroogle goes offline so after days when I was unable to get any searches done in scroogle, I had to find out what happened to scroogle and why it was not working for more than a few weeks.
What Happened to Scroogle?
Whenever scroogle was down, people used to see “google is mad at us” type of message. This time there was no message but it said scroogle is not found. I had to find out that what happened and I found out that it was not Google who shut down the site, it was shut down by its own owner after much frustration, read here : Daniel Brandt at Betabit Article. Nice, free alternative site was attacked by hackers to create denial of service issues. God knows why any hackers want to ruin a good, free service like scroogle is beyond me. But scroogle is gone this time and unlike 2010, it seems scroogle is gone for good.
Find Scroogle Alternatives:
So, if you used scroogle or interested in scroogle alternative, that let you do annyomous search and find your website ranking, what a person to do? I did little research and found a few alternatives which may work as scroogle alternative for now.
What Page I am On:
This is a neat little free search engine tool. You enter your keyword and website URL, it will tell you what page your keyword is sitting on. It does not tell you ranking by number, but you will know page it is sitting on. Currently, what page I am on site is able to do first 10 page searches and be able to tell you if you are there or not.
What I like about What Page I am on:
- Free
- Enter keyword and URL to know your ranking
- Easy to search
Things to consider:
- Only first 10 pages search
- Does not tell ranking # such as #35 or #1, just tells the page URL shows up
Page Wash dot com:
Page wash is free search engine tool where you can do specific search, for example, google.com or google.co.uk for UK based search and so on. You also will have an option for remove all cookies, scripts, remove ads and so on.
Things I like about Page Wash:
- Anonymous search
- Free
- Country, place based search result if you want
- Can clear cookies, scripts
- remove ads and hide referrer information
Things to consider:
- It does not tell you ranking, you have to find it
Duckduck go:
Duckduck go claims to have more privacy than Google and it surely has less ads and spam ads above compare to Google. Seems pretty neat for searching online.
Things I like about duck duck go:
- Pretty neat name for a search engine: seems like we are playing a game 🙂
- Free
- Less ads and spam
- Private searches
Things to consider:
- For ranking you will have to dig and search through your site info
- Search engine results are bit different than google ranking
Start Page:
I am beginning to like start page a lot. You can do private search through ixquick proxy, it does not record and keep your IP information and search are based on unbiased google search. What is not to like;
- Free
- Anonymous search
- No IP recording: protecting your privacy
- Unbiased search results
- Quick
Things to consider:
- Ranking have to be manually searched in
Additional Choice:
There is Encrypted Google for those who may trust google to give unbiased search result. I have used it and it tends to give US based search which is fine for me, as I am US. However for those outside US may not get clear search result for their countries.