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Excellent Utilities: Whoogle Search - self-hosted metasearch engine - LinuxLinks [linuxlinks.com]:

This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. There’s a table listing the tools in this series at the bottom of this page.

Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

Whoogle Search is a privacy-focused search engine. It displays the same results as Google Search but without ads/sponsored content, JavaScript, cookies, or tracking.

Installation

There are a number of different ways to install the software. The method depends on whether you choose a PaaS hosting solution, or run it locally. For our evaluation, we chose a Docker installation on a local machine.

Install the software with the Docker command:

$ docker pull benbusby/whoogle-search

We can then run the software with the command:

$ docker run --publish 5000:5000 --detach --name whoogle-search benbusby/whoogle-search:latest

If you’ve not used Docker before, check out our Docker guide [linuxlinks.com] which will get you up and running.

In Operation

Point your web browser to http://localhost:5000 [localhost] and you’ll see the web interface.

We can click the Configuration link and change various settings such as setting the country, interface language, search language, and more.

Summary

Google’s search engine remains the most popular way to find information on the net. But many users dislike its use of trackers, analysis tools and ads which detract from the user experience.

Whoogle is a great alternative. It’s fast, uncluttered and there’s plenty of customization options. The project’s documentation is pretty good explaining useful configuration steps such as setting Whoogle to be your primary search engine.

While Whoogle is restricted to Google search results, this should not pose an issue to the vast majority of web surfers.

You can deploy it to PaaS [linuxlinks.com] hosting solutions such as Heroku, Fly.io, or Repl.it and lots of other platforms. Or you may choose to install it to a local machine on your network.

Website:github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search [github.com]
Support:
Developer: Ben Busby
License: MIT License

Whoogle Search is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books [linuxlinks.com] and free tutorials [linuxlinks.com].

Complete list of articles in this series:

Excellent UtilitiesAbricotine [linuxlinks.com]Markdown editor with inline preview functionalityAnanicy [linuxlinks.com]Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU prioritiesbroot [linuxlinks.com]Next gen tree explorer and customizable launchercheat.sh [linuxlinks.com]Community driven unified cheat sheetcroc [linuxlinks.com]Securely transfer files and folders from the command-lineDeskreen [linuxlinks.com]Live streaming your desktop to a web browserduf [linuxlinks.com]Disk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic dfexa [linuxlinks.com]A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls commandfd [linuxlinks.com]Wonderful alternative to the venerable findfkill [linuxlinks.com]Kill processes quick and easyfontpreview [linuxlinks.com]Quickly search and preview fontsLanguageTool [linuxlinks.com]Style and grammar checker for 30+ languagesLiquid Prompt [linuxlinks.com]Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zshlnav [linuxlinks.com]Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshootinglsd [linuxlinks.com]Like exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to lsMcFly [linuxlinks.com]Navigate through your bash shell historymdless [linuxlinks.com]Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown filesOCRmyPDF [linuxlinks.com]Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFsPaperwork [linuxlinks.com]Designed to simplify the management of your paperworkPDF Mix Tool [linuxlinks.com]Perform common editing operations on PDF filespeco [linuxlinks.com]Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably usefulripgrep [linuxlinks.com]Recursively search directories for a regex patternscrcpy [linuxlinks.com]Display and control Android devicestldr [linuxlinks.com]Simplified and community-driven man pagestmux [linuxlinks.com]A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflowTusk [linuxlinks.com]An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potentialUlauncher [linuxlinks.com]Sublime application launcherWatson [linuxlinks.com]Track the time spent on projectsWhoogle Search [linuxlinks.com]Self-hosted and privacy-focused metasearch engine

setup and config took ~10 minutes, jury still out

Original Submission