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

[dngray]

Discussed in https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/discussions/177

^{Originally posted by astier October 8, 2021}
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.

[dngray]

I think this would require us to have #1686

A more polished method of using Google without JavaScript I think is worthwhile.

[I-I-IT]

The issue I see here is that we already have Startpage, so what does this bring new to the table ? How can it support TOR while Google captchas all requests from TOR ?

[privacyguides-bot]

This issue has been mentioned on Privacy Guides. There might be relevant details there:

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/startpage-has-apparently-started-to-fingerprint-users/18434/31