Whoogle Search Versions Save

A self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine

v0.8.4

6 months ago

Updates

  • Site favicons are now fetched and displayed for each search result
  • Audio tags are now interpreted correctly
    • Primarily found in word definition cards in the results view
  • POST requests now redirected as encrypted GET requests
    • This allows navigating back from a result website to the Whoogle search result page without having to confirm form resubmission
    • The "GET-only searches" config is still available for anyone who still prefers it
  • URLs in element and window endpoints are now validated
    • Fixes a potential vulnerability where an element or window endpoint could retrieve file contents from a service hosted on another port
  • Valid HTML in result text content is now sanitized to prevent parsing issues

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.8.3...v0.8.4

v0.8.3

8 months ago

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.8.2...v0.8.3

v0.8.2

1 year ago

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.8.1...v0.8.2

v0.8.1

1 year ago

Small update with a few important fixes:

  • Fix issue with incorrect domain substitution when site alts are enabled
  • Use app init encryption key for all queries by default
  • Update sponsored result filter for searches in German
  • Update proxying behavior to allow HTTP-only proxies

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.8.0...v0.8.1

v0.8.0

1 year ago

It's been a while since the last official release! There have been some changes made since 0.7.4 that are fairly noteworthy, including:

  • Complete overhaul of session management
    • Fixed runaway session file creation for public instance maintainers
    • Fixed failure to decrypt subsequent result page queries (i.e. page 2 query appearing as "gAAAAA....")
  • Added ability to navigate through results with Tab and Shift+Tab
  • Added an "Advanced Search" toggle in search results for quickly switching between countries
    • Can be updated to support other search params, if requested
  • Updated filter for sponsored results/advertising content
  • Configured language + country is now included in search suggestion requests
  • Fixed issues with bolding search terms in result pages
  • Added ability to encode configuration in the URL
    • Allows jumping between Whoogle instances (via Farside, for example) and maintaining the same configuration settings
  • Fixed issues with result links to Google domains
  • Reduced the amount of logging the Tor service outputs by default
  • New translations:
    • Thai
    • Kurdish
    • Welsh

And much more!

SourceHut

There's an official "mirror" of the repository on SourceHut at: https://sr.ht/~benbusby/whoogle-search now. It's not technically a "mirror" though, since it does more than just look for changes on GitHub. It's automatically synced with changes pushed to GitHub, but GitHub is also synced with any changes pushed to SourceHut. The two repos are completely interchangeable from a user perspective. If you prefer using SourceHut, feel free to mail in patches, open tickets, etc. If not, feel free to keep using GitHub.

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.7.4...v0.8.0

v0.7.4

1 year ago

Very small, but important update for dark mode users.

Google made changes to the stylesheet returned in the result view for Whoogle search results, which broke certain aspects of dark mode themes. This version should fix the issues introduced by their changes and return the overall styling of Whoogle back to its normal appearance.

v0.7.3

1 year ago

Minor update, with a few fixes:

  • Instances of Whoogle installed via pip should no longer encounter the UnpicklingError issue
  • Fixed "next page" button for searches with a leading slash (i.e. searching /e/OS apps)
  • Fixed endpoints with leading slashes for instances deployed from sub path of a domain (i.e. domain.com/whoogle)
  • Fixed broken behavior for the "open in new tab" config option

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.7.2...v0.7.3

v0.7.2

2 years ago

Features/Improvements

  • Build images now pushed to ghcr.io (still pushed to Docker Hub as usual)
  • Improved "minimal mode"
  • Public instances now accessible in machine readable format via misc/instances.txt
  • Fixed bugs w/ currency conversion
  • Upgraded Python image in Dockerfile to python:3.11.0a5-alpine
  • Updated ad filter
  • Switched to defusedxml for XML parsing
  • Added ability to enable frontend alternatives, but selectively keep the default frontend for specific services
    • For example, if site alts are enabled but you still want to visit youtube.com for YouTube results, set WHOOGLE_ALT_YT to an empty value (i.e. WHOOGLE_ALT_YT="" (all alt environment variables are documented in the README).
  • Updated all remaining frontend alternatives to be redirected through Farside by default
  • Fixed incorrect Chinese and Russian translations
  • Added Korean translations
  • Improved support for relative search results
    • Note: If you're hosting Whoogle behind a path such as mydomain.com/whoogle, you can now set WHOOGLE_URL_PREFIX to the path prefix (in this example, /whoogle)
  • Patched a minor vulnerability involving XSS on the Whoogle error template
    • Passing valid javascript within a tag (i.e. "<script>alert(document.domain)</script>") to the q param for the (now removed) /url endpoint caused the javascript to be executed. This has been fixed by restoring message sanitizing on the error template, as well as removing the unused /url endpoint which provided the only way of accessing the bug.
  • Added a (rough) implementation of Anonymous View
    • Available as a config setting or environment variable (WHOOGLE_CONFIG_ANON_VIEW)
    • Partially overrides the NoJS feature in order to keep result clutter to a minimum
      • NoJS View is now accessible only if both Anonymous View and NoJS are enabled in the config, since it uses the same endpoint as Anonymous View
    • This still has some issues to work through, but is available as a "beta" feature to test out now. Feel free to open an issue or reach out directly (or come to my Twitch stream) if you find a specific site that anonymous view doesn't work with, or otherwise find a bug with it in general.

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.7.1...v0.7.2

v0.7.1

2 years ago

There are a few new Docker related improvements:

There are also a number of various improvements and fixes provided by the community, defailed below. Thanks everyone!

Community Contributions

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.7.0...v0.7.1

v0.7.0

2 years ago

This release came around a little faster than normal, but still has some pretty worthwhile new features, improvements, and fixes.

Features/Improvements

  • Farside integration
    • This is a new service (developed by me) that provides a few new benefits that didn't quite fit into Whoogle itself, namely:
      • "Smart" redirecting to available/working instances of alternative frontends like Nitter, Bibliogram, etc
      • Allows quickly jumping to new Whoogle instances to resume your search if the one you're using is blocked
        • All of your config settings should be parameterized in the generated Farside URL
      • Switching to a valid Searx instance if your instance is blocked and there aren't any other Whoogle instances available (or you just feel like switching to Searx)
      • Evenly distributing traffic to Nitter/Bibliogram/Libreddit instances rather than pooling users on popular instances and creating problems for the maintainer of the instance
  • Scribe replacements for Medium links
  • New environment variables:
    • WHOOGLE_MINIMAL to declutter the result page and only return "regular" result cards
    • WHOOGLE_RESULTS_PER_PAGE to set the number of results per page (wow who would've guessed!)
    • WHOOGLE_AUTOCOMPLETE defaults to "on", but can be set to 0 to turn off search suggestions
  • Search terms are now bold in search results
  • Support DDG bangs with the ! at the end (for short-style bangs)
  • Improved NoJS link formatting in results
  • Instance now shows an "Update Available" message if the instance is not using the latest release
  • Whoogle can now be deployed via Helm chart (https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/pull/522)
  • Improved public instance session management
    • This is a dramatic improvement to how user sessions were handled previously. The new approach enforces that each new user to a Whoogle instance inherits an immutable set of default configuration parameters. Whoogle then validates if the user is allowing cookies to be set by forwarding them to a /session URL that checks for changes to their session ID. If the ID has changed, then the user likely has cookies disabled, and they are blocked from changing their config settings.
    • This should help immensely on public instances where the default config was previously always changing.
  • The "Country" config setting can now be used to emulate a search in that specified country
    • Very useful for public instances that are hosted outside of your geographic location, but you still want relevant results for the country you live in

New Translations

  • Russian

And here's a bulleted list of what's changed and who contributed! Thank you to everyone who has helped out. I really appreciate it.

What's Changed

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/compare/v0.6.0...v0.7.0