Here is the (hopefully final) release of 2025 that brings some hope for the new year. Although we don't have any major breakthroughs, we have added options to ease the pain of the next Google Crackdown. If (and likely when) that does come, I may or may not have a final workaround saved, but if that no longer works, you will have to use the new GCSE feature and BYOK or move to another search engine (Kagi is pretty good with custom search results).
🚀 New Features
Google Custom Search Engine - Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)
A major new feature that allows users to use their own Google Custom Search API credentials as a fallback when traditional scraping is blocked. This will be the way forward if all else fails and Google kills off all the other workarounds that we have. If we are left with this being the only viable option going forward, there will unfortunately be no further updates to Whoogle.
API Integration: Full implementation of Google Custom Search JSON API client
Web & Image Search Support: Both standard web search and image search work via CSE
Easy Configuration: Configure via Settings UI or environment variables (WHOOGLE_CSE_API_KEY, WHOOGLE_CSE_ID, WHOOGLE_USE_CSE)
Smart Tab Filtering: Automatically hides unsupported tabs (Videos/News) when CSE mode is active
Error Handling: Graceful handling of quota limits and API errors with user-friendly messages
Documentation: Comprehensive setup guide in README including Google Cloud Console setup steps
AI Overview Removal
New filter to automatically remove Google's AI Overview/SGE sections from search results
Modern Google Images Support
Added parsing for Google's modern image search endpoint (udm=2)
Extracts actual image URLs from script blobs instead of placeholder thumbnails
Uses Chrome User-Agent for better compatibility
Normalized image grid layout with improved styling
🔧 Improvements
Configuration & Session Management
Refactored configuration and session management for better reliability
Improved preferences handling and encryption
Enhanced config model with new CSE-related attributes
Ability to see your current UA String at the bottom of the results (For troubleshooting or those curious)
Docker & Build
Updated to Python 3.12-alpine3.22 base image
Removed unnecessary bridge package from Dockerfile
Breaking: Dropped support for armv7l architecture due to security bugs in cryptography library
Dependencies
Updated httpx to 0.28.1
Updated various dependencies for security and compatibility
Removed deprecated packages
GitHub Actions
Modernized CI/CD workflows with latest GitHub Actions
Improved tag handling and build conditions
Switched to GitHub Releases for versioning
🐛 Bug Fixes
Fixed image search (mostly)
Fixed result collapsing issue for CSE results (prevented false positive collapse detection)
Various styling fixes for image results layout
📝 Documentation
Added comprehensive BYOK/CSE documentation section
Added armv7l deprecation notice
Updated environment variable documentation
⚠️ Breaking Changes
armv7l Architecture: No longer supported due to security vulnerabilities in the cryptography library. Users on 32-bit ARM devices will need to use alternative architectures, older versions, or build themselves with known security flaws.