Well, I didn’t expect that. Or maybe I did? CookieChoices.org, the search engine (a version of Google) that Google registered and then put live for a few days is now gone.
Back in mid May, right after the European ruling came down related to the “right to remove” your details from Google, a mysterious domain name called CookieChoices.org was registered. The whois record showed that it was, in fact, owned by Google and pointed to their name servers.
RT @bhartzer: Google’s http://t.co/p7Od9heXxi search engine is now LIVE http://t.co/IqhJF89Yq5
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 6, 2014
Last Friday, I reported that CookieChoices.org was, in fact, a live website, although it was, in fact, still delivering cookies. It was after my second post, the one showing that CookieChoices.org was, in fact, a live website available to the public, that I started seeing a lot of activity from Google employees on my blog. They were checking out my blog post about CookieChoices.org, and, in fact, some even read some other blog posts that I’ve written.
But today, when I went to CookieChoices.org (it was only working without the www subdomain), the website is now delivering a 404 error.
I don’t know if I stumbled across a Google-owned website that they were working on (and failed to hide it from the public), or it was possibly someone else who registered that domain name, put it in Google’s name to look like they owned it, and then pointed it to Google’s name servers and made it live.
Whatever the case, CookieChoices.org looks like it’s now MIA.