Microsoft bans Scroogle

Found on The Register on Sunday, 07 January 2007
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Microsoft's MSN Messenger service doesn't want you talking dirty - and its definition of dirty talk is quite peculiar.

If you send an instant message containing the word "scroogle.org" via the Microsoft service, the message never arrives. The sender doesn't know it was discarded, and the recipient has no indication that it was ever sent, as the original message remains in the chat window and history.

Scroogle.org is Daniel Brandt's Google scraping proxy. Scroogle scrapes Google's website to return its search results without ads - bypassing the Google cookie, and protecting the user's privacy. Google is unable to match the searches to any other information. Scroogle makes around 50,000 scrapes per day. As Google has failed to challenge the legality of the service, it's an odd choice of domain for Microsoft to ban.

Or perhaps Microsoft thinks its protecting us from filth - the company has made strange and arbitrary decisions before.

So perhaps "scroogle" refers to some bizarre sexual practice, or, in some arcane vernacular, is a term for the genitalia. If that's true, it's not in Roger's Profanisaurus [probably NSFW], which we regard as the definitive resource in these matters.

MSN isn't the only one here. A few months ago, ICQ refused to deliver any URL I tried to send. However, it was limited to a short time and one recipient only, so who knows what caused it.