Scroogle, the search engine operated by privacy militant and self-appointed Wikipedia watchdog Daniel Brandt, has folded for real. After enduring DDOS attacks "around the clock" that sent a flood of unsustainable traffic to his servers, Mr. Brandt took down the search engine along with his other four domains, namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com. His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.

"These four domains had also been on the web for a long time -- NameBase first went online in 1997, and before that had been available on telnet since 1995. I spent 27 years developing NameBase," he said in an email, and referred to the Wikipedia page.

"I no longer have any domains online," Mr. Brandt wrote. "I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers."

Scroogle was a basic search engine that takes users to their Google results through a circuitous route that masks much of the data Google normally harvests. Google tolerated the site, which had its own nonprofit, and a Google engineer even helped Mr. Brandt get Scroogle whitelisted a few times. But recently, Google started punishing Scroogle severely for queries, choking off access for 90 minutes at a time. Google says it was not targeting Scroogle but that the search engine may have tripped a spam control mechanism.

"Scroogle.org is gone forever," Mr. Brandt wrote. "Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google's throttling, and was already dying. It might have lasted another six months if I hadn't lost seven servers from DDoS, but that's about all."

The search engine had some die-hard fans. But if privacy friendliness is what you seek, there are other options.

Scroogle.com, formerly a porn site and the cause of some embarrassing NSFW confusion, has also gone off the air.

GO IPO YOURSELF. A young coworker in our newsroom has quit Facebook, she says, because she doesn't want the company and its shareholders making bank off her data in an IPO. And she's not the only one! When she told a friend, the friend said she'd done the same thing for the same reason. Just one more and it makes a trend! Meanwhile, that high school senior who wrote a florid New York Post editorial which said, among other things, that "Lost in the hype of the company’s stock-market debut this year is that while Facebook is ubiquitous, it may also be a fad," merely quit because the site was making him feel bad.

KHOSLA KLEARED IN KIOR KONSPIRACY. Dan Primack gives Sand Hill fund Khosla Ventures his blessing with a debunking of some nasty rumors. "A source told me that a notable VC firm had been propping up one of its larger portfolio company's valuations in order to raise a big new fund," Mr. Primack wrote today. "Since then, however, I've heard the exact same theory from two other, independent sources. And then came news that the SEC was inquiring about PE firms boosting portfolio valuations while fundraising. So I revisited. And found compelling evidence that the 'conspiracy' was unfounded... I'm talking about Khosla Ventures and portfolio company is KiOR (KIOR)—a renewable fuels company developing technology to convert biomass into renewable crude oil." Sounds salacious! But the timing of the conspiracy theory didn't work; Khosla closed its fund before KIOR went public.

SCROOGLED. No story on Betabeat has had more theories around it that the borking of Scroogle, a privacy-friendly search engine that returns Google results without the attendant Big Brother data. The story hit Techmeme and Google was quick to write in, in the wake of its most recent privacy kerfuffles, to deny it had targeted the little nonprofit. We also got notes from Scroogle fans and enemies of Daniel Brandt—that dude has pissed off many people, we can confirm—and a note from the man himself, who suspects suspected LulzSec-associated hacker Ryan Cleary or maybe his girlfriend or friends of being behind DDOS attacks that borked the poor SCROOG. "Just Google Daniel Brandt+blackmail to see what the Internet thinks about him," one commenter wrote. Everyone keeps directing us to http://thereisajosephevers.blogspot.com/2011/09/official-online-review-daniel-brandts.html. If you want to go down a hacker feud wormhole, there's your Friday night.

BUZZFEED SEEKS TWIT TO FEED TWITTER BUZZ. BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith (@buzzfeedben) is looking for a Twitter writer, via Twitter.

Job listing: I'm looking for a twitter savant to write @buzzfeed, plus some other stuff, but primarily that. ben@buzzfeed.com

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) February 14, 2012

Ooh, whoever gets that will have a distinctive advantage in the World's Most Deadly Game.

Google says it did not target Scroogle specifically, but acknowledge Scroogle could have tripped a censor. “We do have automated systems to deter scraping or excessive queries to Google, and spikes in query traffic can cause issues for some sites,” a spokesman said in an email.

But now a tipster writes in with an image of a private forum post that appears to be written by Daniel Brandt, the militant privacy advocate who created the Scroogle engine as well as the sites Google Watch and Wikipedia Watch. There is no way to confirm the authenticity of the post, and Mr. Brandt has not responded to an email request for comment. Take what follows with a giant grain of salt.

But in the purported forum post, "Daniel Brandt" has a different theory than Scroogle presents in its error page. He identifies Ryan Cleary, the 19-year-old British hacker charged with cyber attacks attributed to the Hacker Collective LulzSec (although more specifically, he identifies Mr. Cleary's girlfriend, for bringing over a computer).

Whether it was Mr. Cleary or friends of the same, this alternative theory proposes that the hacker orchestrated DDOS attacks, in which a flood of traffic overwhelms a site, against Scroogle and Wikipedia Watch out of personal malice for Mr. Brandt.

"It was clear by now that I was the target, and not just wikipedia-watch," the post says. "The SYN_RECV that I captured in December showed that Scroogle IP addresses were targeted, and sometimes any other open port."

The purported Mr. Brandt admits Google isn't the real culprit—although if Google didn't clamp down on IP addresses that were fetching search results, he wouldn't have a problem.

"Scroogle has gone from 350,000 searches per day to about 200,000 per day," the post says. "I blame Friends of Ryan Cleary. For the attempted searches that don't go through, I show a screen blaming Google. After all, if Google hadn't started this 'mild' form of throttling in March 2011, I could handle the load on two servers instead of six."

Regardless of the cause, it sounds like the nonprofit that shares a name with a Cory Doctorow story is in trouble.

If you have any additional information on this, shoot us an email.

A satirical image from Scroogle, reflecting the search engine's tendentious position on Google's privacy policy. (scroogle.org)

UPDATE: Google says it did not target Scroogle specifically. "We do have automated systems to deter scraping or excessive queries to Google, and spikes in query traffic can cause issues for some sites," a spokesman said in an email.

Not long ago, Google changed its privacy policy to give itself more liberties with user data. Every time a major Internet company gets media attention for privacy issues, search volume goes way up on Scroogle, a little independent, nonprofit search engine. Scroogle scrapes its search results from Google, but it shields a user's real IP address and prevents Google from setting a cookie, making it impossible for Google to tell which searches are from the same person; it also does not show ads. But today, the 11-year-old service stopped working.

Scrooglers who attempt a search right now get an error message: "Forbidden. So sorry... Google is temporarily blocking this server."

Google has blocked Scroogle twice before, according to U.K.-based The Register, albeit unintentionally. The service has actually received help on a few occasions from Google employees, says Scroogle creator Daniel Brandt, who also operates the blog Google Watch.

Already, users are sending letters to the Federal Trade Commission.

The note from Scroogle:

Yes, Scroogle is upset with Google.

1. Google handles 1 billion searches per day, while Scroogle handled 350,000 searches per day. This means that Scroogle was 0.035 percent of Google's load.

2. Google owns 900,000 servers, while Scroogle leased just six low-end dedicated servers.

3. Google has $45 billion in the bank, while Scroogle is a recognized public charity and survives on modest donations averaging $43 per day.

4. For more than seven years, Scroogle has always made serious efforts to detect and block any and all bots. Almost every Scroogle searcher is a live person clicking on a mouse. Yet Google treats Scroogle like a bot because they see the traffic from our IP addresses as higher than normal. Searching Google with a bot is against Google's terms of service, but Scroogle users are not bots.

Is it "Terms of Service" for Google, or is it "Terms of Monopoly"?

Google and Scroogle did not immediately respond to emails. We'll keep digging.