What is Reddit's opinion of
Whoogle Search?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
39 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
For everyone else -- Whoogle anonymizes google searches as much as possible while still leaving the interface mostly intact. The author has put a lot of work into making it as seamless as possible. It even has search suggestion autocomplete working for all browsers. I use it as my default search engine now.
They were relisted on PrivacyTools after clarifying the situation. If you are looking for a self-hostable alternative there is also Whoogle Search.
If anyone puts together a docker-compose yml i would be soooooooo happy and thankful.
Edit: I think I did it.
Follow the instructions for Docker per the github instructions.
git clone https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search.git cd whoogle-search docker build --tag whooglesearch:1.0 . docker run --publish 8888:5000 --detach --name whooglesearch whooglesearch:1.0
Then kill it
docker rm --force whooglesearch
Then make a docker-compose.yml with:
version: '3.3' services: whooglesearch: ports: - '8888:5000' container_name: whooglesearch image: 'whooglesearch:1.0'
Then start it
docker-compose up -d
I'm doing this on a QNAP (ContainerStation), so no git for me. Instead of the git command above I used
wget https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/archive/master.zip unzip master.zip
What precautions can we take against this? Obviously they can get my personal computers with a warrant, but what information can they get with this bill that we can bock?
I've already got a pihole and use the very cool Whoogle Search. I'm going to get my entire LAN on a VPN to hide my traffic in a big crowd.
I recently implemented this awesome project, Whoogle, that gets Google search results but removes all the BS. Did all that only to find out that I can't even use it with my Apple products; can't use it on the iPhone or my Mac in Safari. On both the Mac and iPhone you used to be able to add in your own search engine if it wasn't one of the ones already in Safari. But nope! Not anymore Apple just removed that feature.
DuckDuckGo is great for day-to-day searching, especially if you learn to use the bangs to get to exactly what you're looking for.
But if you're like me and spend most days searching through old mailing lists to find the one person back in 1997 who encountered the bug that's been making you lose sleep for three days then you need Google.
Luckily if you're like me you can also spin up something like Searx or whoogle to strip out the ads and amp links
> many are unusable with no results compared to the other search engines available on market today.
you need to use the ones that support google results, and configure them to display search image results as well. i also used to find searx results unusable until i figured out that their settings have to be tweaked a bit. otherwise, you can use https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search which is the next best thing.
If you just want Google results have you considered using Whoogle instead? There are several public instances.
> gives me results as good as google
If this is your expectation going in you might have a bad time. Google's results are only as good as they are because of all the data they gather on you.
If you're just proxying the results, even if they come from Google, they'll never be as good at the end of the day. Though they should still be serviceable 99% of the time.
The link was just meant as an example. There are many others.
The idea, though, is that you would selfhost it.
You can also host alternative frontends like Invidious, Whoogle or Bibliogram (or a different alternative frontend, there are many others such as nitter, etc. Just do a quick Duckduckgo search ;) )
In that case a hosted whoogle instance could come useful. It’ll act as a proxy between you and google, whilst stripping out ads/trackers. It’ll function exactly the same with the same design/results.
The moment it sold out to an advertising company it removed any trust i had for it. Even if it claims to still follow the same paths/morals, it still doesn’t change the privacy invasive company it’s owned by.
If you just want google search results either use hosted whoogle (looks exactly like google) or selfhosted with the tor option enabled, or searx with google’s search engine enabled.
Between duckduckgo and startpage tho, I’d say duckduckgo is more private.
Yes, Google would identify the public IP address of the device hosting Whoogle. There are options for dealing with that, though.
First, you could deploy it on a remote server if you have access to one.
Second, you could use a VPN on all internet traffic from Whoogle. This is pretty easy with Docker installations.
Third, Whoogle comes with support for Tor.
Personally, I use the VPN option.
Edit: you can get more information here - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
I found the same thing. Normal searches work great on DDG but finding obscure documentation is harder. I set up a proxy search engine with Whoogle, which uses google’s search engine but strips out the AMP links, tracking parameters, and ads.
Yeah, that’s a good call out; I see there’s a discussion for proxy/Tor support. I should mention I’ve only tried Whoogle using the Heroku Quick Deploy and on Repl.
In addition to the containers approach you could also run and use a Whoogle instance.
> Whoogle is intended to only ever be deployed to private instances by individuals of any background, 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 think it is a good alternative to users that only wish to use Google results, but I prefer to use searx at this time. A good section on their readme is their FAQ where they compare searx with whoogle.
Websites will know if you're using Tor to visit them, and there's no simple way around that. You can connect to a VPN or proxy over Tor, then access Google, but this has serious privacy implications, and is usually a bad idea.
If you want to use Google over Tor, I recommend using these frontends for it instead:
I've hosted my instance on Heroku for free for the past 8 months and it's working fine. No issues with it being flagged for suspicious behavior.
Heroku does spin down the instance after 15 minutes of inactivity. A fresh access after that usually takes about a minute or two for the instance to spin up and show the site. To get over this, I use uptimerobot to ping the site every minute, so that the instance is always running. Even with that, it comes within the free usage on my Heroku account.
Description from the creator's GitHub page for those who want to know a little more (like me):
>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.
>Features >* 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
This seems exactly like what I've been looking for! Super awesome! Thanks u/spieciestmemelord69!
I've started selfhosting whoogle. The results are from Google so its actually good searching and it gets proxied via Tor so your IP is obfuscated. Very happy with the experience so far and its hard to go back to DDG now.
There is a self hosted alternative called Whoogle which at least allows you to do google search without all google tracking and ads, plus you can do that via TOR.
I can't see a reason why using just the ip address would be an issue. Unless you want to add more selfhosted services than you'd need domains I believe. I use ufw (firewall) to block access to everybody bar me.
The themes are easy enough to edit to your liking. And a new dark one was added just yesterday I think by another user.
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/wiki/User-Contributed-CSS-Themes
Not technically a search engine, but I use Whoogle.
It's a Google-search proxy with privacy features. You could self-host or use one of the public instances : https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#public-instances
It has suggestions and results are exactly same as Google.
Yes, but they're owned by ad company System1 (who also own Waterfox btw), so I wouldn't give them much trust. If you need Google-only search results, better to use a Whoogle instance and have StartPage as a backup.
You could use a public whoogle instance instead (I’d avoid the ones that use cloudfare) , this for e.g. You‘d get the exact same results as if u were using google, and the design looks pretty similar.
I have it set up the same!
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/wiki/User-Contributed-CSS-Themes
Its the Doppelgänger theme.
Edit: and as an aside, if you're deplying via docker, all of that has to be entered as one line, so here ya go!
:root { /* LIGHT THEME COLORS / --whoogle-logo: #685e79; --whoogle-page-bg: #ffffff; --whoogle-element-bg: #4285f4; --whoogle-text: #000000; --whoogle-contrast-text: #ffffff; --whoogle-secondary-text: #70757a; --whoogle-result-bg: #ffffff; --whoogle-result-title: #1967d2; --whoogle-result-url: #0d652d; --whoogle-result-visited: #4b11a8; / DARK THEME COLORS */ --whoogle-dark-logo: #685e79; --whoogle-dark-page-bg: #212131; --whoogle-dark-element-bg: #4285f4; --whoogle-dark-text: #ffffff; --whoogle-dark-contrast-text: #ffffff; --whoogle-dark-secondary-text: #bbbbbb; --whoogle-dark-result-bg: #121222; --whoogle-dark-result-title: #64a7f6; --whoogle-dark-result-url: #34a853; --whoogle-dark-result-visited: #bbbbff; } #whoogle-w { fill: #4285f4; } #whoogle-h { fill: #ea4335; } #whoogle-o-1 { fill: #fbbc05; } #whoogle-o-2 { fill: #4285f4; } #whoogle-g { fill: #34a853; } #whoogle-l { fill: #ea4335; } #whoogle-e { fill: #fbbc05; }
Think of it this way, the problem is not that Google and Facebook harvest our data, the problem is that most people are addicted convenience.
Mozilla defeated Microsoft and internet explorer and the saved us from a toxic monopoly only to create a power vacuum that was filled by google and chrome. People stuck with IE because it came pre-installed with windows, that's it. Until privacy becomes the convenient default, we will only cycle through toxic corporations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon.
I am guilty of this too, I have been thinking of setting up my own email server for months now but have not been able to lift a finger thanks to a lack of motivation.
Lookup whoogle (https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search ), you can now have your own mini-google but even that I have been too lazy to set up.
You should try Whoogle.
Whoogle is basically self-hosted search engine and here are some of it's features :
Features
- 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.
You can find it here : https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
I recommend avoiding startpage because its now owned by an ad company, I recommend using whoogle which does exactly what you're looking for you can host your own instance or use other peoples, The one I use is https://søk.bentebent.no/ but if you're looking to host it here's the github https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
This is a bit more complicated solution (not if you know how to use Docker and have a Docker host), but I run whoogle which is open source server software that handles your Google queries and it displays the results back to you in a way the looks like Google, but no ads, tracking, etc. it’s different from DDG and start page in that it’s self hosted and it still serves Google results, but it just processes them for you to make them more cleaned up. I love it.
Sorry, I didn't find any public instance to test it.
But apparently it has opensearch, but there is an error on it and it was design to work only on Firefox.
Maybe if you modify your opensearch(dot)xml as stated here by sutidor, it will make it work. If you, check on chromium tap to search website, you can see that the suggested opensearch file meets the requirements to make it work.
Edit: Corrected some stuff.
Whoogle is a pretty great thing, especially if you use it with a remote server or on VPN. Super easy to get it up and running locally with docker-compose.
I use a google proxy called whoogle which works great. All my searches are local and all my links have tracking codes removed. And because it’s running on my VPS even the IP is different.
If you can host your own apps, you can host your own whoogle instance.
"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."
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
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.
Hi! I think whoogle's faq has a good answer on that: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#faq, but basically:
- Searx uses many sources and whoogle only uses Google
- Whoogle uses Google's likeness to reduce the transition pains
- Whoogle is missing some features, like a content sanitizer
- Whoogle is easier to deploy for non-technical people
> Also dont use Google for searches. Either DDG or startpage is a must.
Startpage is great for getting google results privately, but even better is a new self-hosted project called Whoogle SearchWhoogle Search. It’s really, really, great.
Hmmm... Nothing against this, but why would someone use this over SearX?
Ninja Edit: Never mind, asked and answered. :) See their FAQ as posted in here: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#faq