whoogle-search 0.1.0

Self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting alternative to Google search

Whoogle Search

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.

Contents

1. Features
2. Setup
3. Install/Deploy
4. Usage
5. Extra Steps
6. FAQ
7. Screenshots

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
• POST request search queries (when possible)
• View images at full res without site redirect (currently mobile only)
• Dark mode
• Randomly generated User Agent
• Easy to install/deploy
• Optional location-based searching (i.e. results near <city>)
• Optional NoJS mode to disable all Javascript in results

Setup

If using Heroku/Heroku Quick Deploy:

• A Heroku Account
  • Allows for free hosting of the web app and single-click deployment.
  • Alternatively, you can host the app using a different service, or deploy it to your own server (explained below).

If deploying manually:

• Docker (Windows, macOS, Ubuntu, other Linux distros)
  • Only needed if you intend on deploying the app as a Docker image
• Python3
• libcurl4-openssl-dev and libssl-dev
  • macOS: brew install openssl curl-openssl
  • Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install -y libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev
  • Arch: pacman -S curl openssl
• Heroku CLI
  • Only needed if you want to deploy the app to Heroku but don't want to use the deploy button shortcut.

Install

There are a few different ways to begin using the app, depending on your preferences:

A) Heroku Quick Deploy (Free)

B) Manual Setup (non-Docker)

Clone the repo and run the following commands to start the app in a local-only environment:

git clone https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search.git
cd whoogle-search
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
./run

C) Manual Setup (Docker)

1. Ensure the Docker daemon is running, and is accessible by your user account

• To add user permissions, you can execute sudo usermod -aG docker yourusername
• Running docker ps should return something besides an error. If you encounter an error saying the daemon isn't running, try sudo systemctl start docker (Linux) or ensure the docker tool is running (Windows/macOS).

2. Clone and deploy the docker app using a method below:

Using Heroku CLI

heroku login
heroku container:login
git clone https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search.git
cd whoogle-search
heroku create
heroku container:push web
heroku container:release web
heroku open

This series of commands can take a while, but once you run it once, you shouldn't have to run it again. The final command, heroku open will launch a tab in your web browser, where you can test out Whoogle and even set it as your primary search engine.

Using your own server, or alternative container deployment

There are other methods for deploying docker containers that are well outlined in this article, but there are too many to describe set up for each here. Generally it should be about the same amount of effort as the Heroku deployment.

Depending on your preferences, you can also deploy the app yourself on your own infrastructure. This route would require a few extra steps:

• A server (I personally recommend Digital Ocean or Linode, their cheapest tiers will work fine)
• Your own URL (I suppose this is optional, but recommended)
• SSL certificates (free through Let's Encrypt)
• A bit more experience or willingness to work through issues

Usage

Same as most search engines, with the exception of filtering by time range.

To filter by a range of time, append ":past " to the end of your search, where can be hour, day, month, or year. Example: coronavirus updates :past hour

Extra Steps

Set Whoogle as your primary search engine

Update browser settings:

• Firefox (Desktop)
  • Navigate to your app's url, and click the 3 dot menu in the address bar. At the bottom, there should be an option to "Add Search Engine". Once you've clicked this, open your Firefox Preferences menu, click "Search" in the left menu, and use the available dropdown to select "Whoogle" from the list.
• Firefox (iOS)
  • In the mobile app Settings page, tap "Search" within the "General" section. There should be an option titled "Add Search Engine" to select. It should prompt you to enter a title and search query url - use the following elements to fill out the form:
    • Title: "Whoogle"
    • URL: "https://<your whoogle url>/search?q=%s"
• Others (TODO)

Customizing and Configuration

Whoogle currently allows a few minor configuration settings, accessible from the home page:

• "Near"
  • Set to a city name to narrow your results to a general geographic region. This can be useful if you rely on being able to search for things like "pizza places" and see results in your city, rather than results from wherever the server is located.
• Dark Mode
  • Sets background to pure black
• NoJS Mode (Experimental)
  • Adds a separate link for each search result that will open the webpage without any javascript content served. Can be useful if you're seeking a no-javascript experience on mobile, but otherwise could just be accomplished with a browser plugin.

Prevent Downtime (Heroku only)

Part of the deal with Heroku's free tier is that you're allocated 550 hours/month (meaning it can't stay active 24/7), and the app is temporarily shut down after 30 minutes of inactivity. Once it becomes inactive, any Whoogle searches will still work, but it'll take an extra 10-15 seconds for the app to come back online before displaying the result, which can be frustrating if you're in a hurry.

A good solution for this is to set up a simple cronjob on any device at your home that is consistently powered on and connected to the internet (in my case, a PiHole worked perfectly). All the device needs to do is fetch app content on a consistent basis to keep the app alive in whatever ~17 hour window you want it on (17 hrs * 31 days = 527, meaning you'd still have 23 leftover hours each month if you searched outside of your target window).

For instance: */20 7-23 * * * curl https://<your heroku app name>.herokuapp.com > /home/<username>/whoogle-refresh will fetch the home page of the app every 20 minutes between 7am and midnight, allowing for downtime from midnight to 7am. And again, this wouldn't be a hard limit - you'd still have plenty of remaining hours of uptime each month in case you were searching after this window has closed.

FAQ

What's the difference between this and Searx?

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, Whoole 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'm a huge fan of Searx though and encourage anyone to use that instead if they want access to other search engines/a different UI/more configuration.

Why does the image results page look different?

A lot of the app currently piggybacks on Google's existing support for fetching results pages with Javascript disabled. To their credit, they've done an excellent job with styling pages, but it seems that the image results page - particularly on mobile - is a little rough. Moving forward, with enough interest, I'd like to transition to fetching the results and parsing them into a unique Whoogle-fied interface that I can style myself.

Screenshots

Desktop

Mobile