SwissCows

secure, private search engine

[dstiles]

Recently came across swisscows but I can't discover how they get their content. Do they get it from other engines? If not, what crawler do they use and what IPs? Can't find any of this information but if it's as good as it looks I'd like to ensure they can get content from my sites.

[engine]

It's using Bing as it's main index, but is also building its own.

[company.swisscows.ch...]

[lammert]

I love their datacenter setup [company.swisscows.ch]. What I don't like is that all clicks of the top listings in the SERPs are going through smartredirect.de, which is an ad monetizing company. These links are not marked as ads. So they might tell you that they are a secure private search engine, but without asking you any consent they are happily redirecting you through an external advertizing company and making money on the way.

[tangor]

Where do some of these names come from? Wonder what tucows thinks of this?

[dstiles]

Thanks for the link, engine! I had only seen a couple of those pages as linked from the main site.

No crawler info, I see, such as UA or IP.

lammert - I'm ok with the adverts as I never click on such things. :)

[lammert]

I am not talking about the banner advertising. The top links in the SERPs are the adverts and they have the same layout as the organic links.

[dstiles]

I'm seeing one obvious advert, changing per search, and then straight into the serps...

[engine]

I know that the SERPs are mostly from Bing, but it does suggest it has its own.
Has anyone discovered the crawler they might be using?

[iamlost]

Swisscows appears!? to use Bing for its English data and some other unspecified source for German data.
Note: uses Yandex for translation; has an office in Russia; possible does/could use Yandex data.

The ‘Swisscows Crawler’ appears!? to be an in datastore crawler rather than a web crawler. Swisscows is a subsidiary of Hulbee AG which is a desktop and enterprise appliance including in-site and data lake/warehouse search.

Re: revenue:

Swisscows is financed by advertising revenues and other services.

Because Swisscows does not monitor users and thus does not save or pass on user data either for themselves or for others, Swisscows has developed its own advertising concept. The concept is a software technology called AdAnounce that works similar to Google AdWords technology, with the important exception that user data is not passed on to the advertiser.

In addition to advertising revenues, Swisscows also makes turnover with software projects, technology licensing and plans to provide additional software and hardware services. All these services guarantee privacy.

I like its UI and somewhat alternative info bubble results, however the corporate and application info is pure marketing spiel babble hype.