What's a Scroogle??

A classmate alerted me to scroogle, a Google-based "scraper" alternative to what many feel is a surrender of privacy when people start using the Web's most popular search engine.

for context, boingboing had this a few days ago:

It may be that Google is simply tracking click-throughs and not associating them with users, but it sure doesn't look like it. Look at the letter-salad at the end of the real URL there: "U4gJQ6_fBqKiQevXjYIO". That looks like a unique identifier to me -- if all Google cares about is which result is most popular with searchers, there'd be no reason to uniquely identify each click

I'll keep using Google for now. But we're at the beginning of a new semester in a database and Web research class at Chapel Hill. I'm stoked and ready to learn about the process that is searching for information. 'Til now, my searching has been a haphazard endeavor, characterized by following paths of least resistance, just bumping into information. I'm ready to learn from some true information professionals.