Whoogle-Search: New Meta-Search-Engine for Google

[astier]

whoogle-search is a self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine. Get Google search results, but without any ads, javascript, AMP links, cookies, or IP address tracking. Easily deployable in one click as a Docker app, and customizable with a single config file. Quick and simple to implement as a primary search engine replacement on both desktop and mobile.

• No ads or sponsored content
• No javascript
• No cookies
• No tracking/linking of your personal IP address*
• No AMP links
• No URL tracking tags (i.e. utm=%s)
• No referrer header
• Tor and HTTP/SOCKS proxy support
• Autocomplete/search suggestions
• POST request search and suggestion queries (when possible)
• View images at full res without site redirect (currently mobile only)
• Dark mode
• Randomly generated User Agent
• Easy to install/deploy
• DDG-style bang (i.e. !<tag> <query>) searches
• Optional location-based searching (i.e. results near <city>)
• Optional NoJS mode to disable all Javascript in results

^{*If deployed to a remote server, or configured to send requests through a VPN, Tor, proxy, etc.}

Whoogle is intended to only ever be deployed to private instances by individuals of any background (although public instances exist), with as little effort as possible. Prior knowledge of/experience with the command line or deploying applications is not necessary to deploy Whoogle, which isn't the case with Searx. As a result, Whoogle is missing some features of Searx in order to be as easy to deploy as possible.

Whoogle also only uses Google search results, not Bing/Quant/etc, and uses the existing Google search UI to make the transition away from Google search as unnoticeable as possible.

I have been using it for a couple of days and it was easy to install, configure, works reliable, gives good results and looks good.

[elitejake]

It looks great. Will come in handy if DDG doesn't give relevant results.

How does it handle Google's CAPTCHA, though?
How is this different from a searx instance with only Google selected?

[astier]

How does it handle Google's CAPTCHA, though?

I am not sure. Although I didn't had to many problems. There is an open issue benbusby/whoogle-search#211

How is this different from a searx instance with only Google selected?

1. The UI is different and looks more like google. It also doesn't only show the links to the results but also

• top-stories
• images
• related search-term-suggestions which other users also searched for
• organizations and people which are related to the search-term
• graphics and statistics

Just everything google shows additionally to the search-results. Here are some screenshots https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#screenshots

2. With whoogle I actually get all the results from google. For some reason Searx + Google omits occasionally some results from sites like youtube and twitter. Instead of 10 results per page I than get only 7 on the first page. Searx + Startpage however fixes this issue.

3. Searx + Google fails to show me good results from my country. On the google-website I can set up google to show me search-results in English (I prefer English results). But if I set my search-region to my country (Germany) google also is able to show me relevant results if I search for Germany-specific terms and organizations/institutions. Searx + Google only is able to show me good English-results but bad German results. Searx + startpage however fixes this issue again.

[dngray]

I think this could have some benefit as Google specific functionality is probably a little more polished than Searx.

I think we'd want to have our Self Hosting overview page in action first. privacyguides/privacyguides.org#1686