Whoogle

Overview

A self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine >[!WARNING]

Since 16 January, 2025, Google has been attacking the ability to perform search queries without JavaScript enabled. This is a fundamental part of how Whoogle works — Whoogle requests the JavaScript-free search results, then filters out garbage from the results page and proxies all external content for the user.

This is possibly a breaking change that may mean the end for Whoogle. We’ll continue fighting back and releasing workarounds until all workarounds are exhausted or a better method is found. If you know of a better way, please review and comment in our Way Forward Discussion The project has 11K+ GitHub stars and is licensed under MIT.

Key Features

Source: GitHub README

• Incremental Results: Working UAs are saved immediately to the output file (append mode), so progress is preserved even if interrupted
• Duplicate Detection: Automatically skips UAs already in the output file when resuming
• Random Query Cycling: By default, cycles through diverse search queries to simulate realistic usage patterns
• Rate Limit Detection: Detects and reports Google rate limiting with recovery instructions
• Comprehensive Validation: Checks for:
• HTTP status codes (blocks, server errors, rate limits)
• Block markers (unusual traffic, upgrade browser messages)
• Success markers (actual search result HTML elements)
• JavaScript-only pages and redirects
• Response size validation

Getting Started

Source: GitHub README

Persistent install:

pipx install https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

Sandboxed temporary instance:

pipx run --spec git+https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search.git whoogle-search

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Normalized Features

Source: tool-features-normalized.json

apt, brew, custom css, docker, docker compose, elasticsearch, helm, kubernetes, mobile app, one click deploy, pip, privacy focused, rate limiting, reports, tags, themes.