Whoogle Search
A self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine
Ben Busby
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)
- Light/Dark/System theme modes (with support for custom CSS theming)
- 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 view search results in a separate window with JavaScript blocked
*No third party JavaScript. Whoogle can be used with JavaScript disabled, but if enabled, uses JavaScript for things like presenting search suggestions. **No third party cookies. Whoogle uses server side cookies (sessions) to store non-sensitive configuration settings such as theme, language, etc. Just like with JavaScript, cookies can be disabled and not affect Whoogle's search functionality. ***If deployed to a remote server, or configured to send requests through a VPN, Tor, proxy, etc.
⚠️ Google's recent changes have made it difficult to provide JavaScript-free search results, which may affect Whoogle's functionality.
This release introduces Mullvad Leta as the default search backend:
- Privacy-focused search powered by Google results without tracking
- Can be disabled in settings to fall back to traditional Google search
- Seamless result formatting and optimized layout
- Only regular web search is supported (no image, video, news, or map searches)
Other improvements include:
- Updated UI Config to respect User Agent in ENV file if it exists
- Added Turkish language translation update
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.9.3...v1.1.0
⚠️ Recently, Google has been making changes that prevent access to JavaScript-free search results. This may affect Whoogle's functionality. The development team is working on a solution.
This update includes several improvements:
- Updated UI Config to respect User Agent in ENV file if it exists
- Added Turkish language translation update
- Various security updates and dependency upgrades
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.9.3...v0.9.4
This update includes improvements to the user interface and stability:
- Fixed styling issues with the Lynx User Agent
- Improved Kubernetes deployment support
- Various security updates and dependency upgrades
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.9.2...v0.9.3
⚠️ Due to recent Google changes affecting JavaScript-free search results, some layout styling may be temporarily broken. The development team is working on a solution.
This update includes several improvements:
- Added new user agent options for better compatibility
- Improved search functionality for non-English languages
- Reduced Docker image size for better performance
- Updated DuckDuckGo search parameters
- Various security and stability improvements
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.9.1...v0.9.2
This update includes several improvements and new features:
- Added support for custom environment file paths
- Added ability to define fallback search engine URLs
- Fixed USPS tracking link display on mobile devices
- Improved config security by switching to JSON format
- Various security updates and dependency upgrades
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/releases/tag/v0.9.1
This update includes several improvements and new features:
- Custom bangs for quick searches
- "Feeling Lucky" functionality has been fixed
- Improved error handling and query extraction
- Stack Overflow added as a default site alternative
- Various security updates and dependency upgrades
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/releases/tag/v0.9.0
Minor update:
- Site favicons are now fetched and displayed for each search result
- Audio tags are now interpreted correctly
- Primarily found in word definition cards in the results view
- POST requests now redirected as encrypted GET requests
- This allows navigating back from a result website to the Whoogle search result page without having to confirm form resubmission
- The "GET-only searches" config is still available for anyone who still prefers it
- URLs in element and window endpoints are now validated
- Fixes a potential vulnerability where an element or window endpoint could retrieve file contents from a service hosted on another port
- Valid HTML in result text content is now sanitized to prevent parsing issues
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/releases/tag/v0.8.4
This update fixes a Cookie Consent bug affecting all EU users.
Full release notes are found at https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/releases/tag/v0.8.3
- adding time constraint to search options
- Fix: added a functionality to make sure escaped characters stay escaped.
- Can be updated to support other search params, if requested
- adding line break between header options
- Add whoogle.ungovernable.men to list of instances
- Omit 'mobile.' and 'm.' in site alt replacements
- Don't prepend services that have schemes with '//'
- Add two more ungovernable.men instances
- Add a function to check if target_word contains CJK characters
- Add instruction on fixing the fly.toml before deploying
- Greek Translation request
- Added Indonesian translation
- Add Azerbaijani translation
- Bump cryptography from 3.3.2 to 39.0.1
- Bump werkzeug from 0.16.0 to 2.2.3
- Add calculator widget
- Add authentication to cookie
- Fix a bug on remove_block_titles() and remove_block_url()
- Update zh-tw translation
Complete overhaul of session management
- Fixed runaway session file creation for public instance maintainers
- Fixed failure to decrypt subsequent result page queries (i.e. page 2 query appearing as "gAAAAA....")
Added ability to navigate through results with Tab and Shift+Tab
Added an "Advanced Search" toggle in search results for quickly switching between countries
- Can be updated to support other search params, if requested
Updated filter for sponsored results/advertising content
Configured language + country is now included in search suggestion requests
Fixed issues with bolding search terms in result pages
Added ability to encode configuration in the URL
Allows jumping between Whoogle instances (via Farside, for example) and maintaining the same configuration settings
Fixed issues with result links to Google domains
Reduced the amount of logging the Tor service outputs by default
New translations:
- Thai
- Kurdish
- Welsh
