whoogle-search

Whoogle Search is a self-hosted search tool that fetches results from Google but strips away the parts many people find intrusive: ads, tracking of your IP address, cookies from Google, AMP links, and URL tracking tags. You run it on your own server or a free cloud host, then point your browser to use it as your default search engine. You get Google's search results through a clean, private interface that does not identify you to Google.

Important notice from the README: as of April 2026, Whoogle has reached its final release. Since early 2025, Google has been blocking the type of requests Whoogle relies on by continuously banning the identifiers Whoogle uses to query Google without JavaScript. The project maintainer states that all efforts to find a workaround have failed. The project is no longer being actively maintained. Existing installs may continue to work if you supply your own Google Custom Search Engine key, or if you find a compatible identifier string to hardcode, but no further fixes are planned.

Before this situation, the project offered a wide range of deployment options: a one-click Docker image, a deploy button for Heroku, and integrations with Fly.io, Render, Repl.it, Koyeb, and other platforms. It also supported routing all requests through Tor or a proxy for additional privacy, custom search shortcuts similar to those in DuckDuckGo, light and dark themes, and optional location-based results.

The tool worked by acting as a go-between: your browser talks to your Whoogle instance, Whoogle queries Google without JavaScript, and the results come back to you without Google ever seeing your real IP address or setting its own cookies in your browser. That go-between approach is what Google's recent changes disrupted.

The repository is still publicly available and the code still exists for anyone who wants to study it, fork it, or attempt to revive it with a new method for querying Google. The full README is longer than what was shown.