First of all hi all! I am a software engineer and in my free time I develop self-hostable alternative to big tech products (see Jotty and Cr*nmaster for example), been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it (mostly stuff I personally would prefer worked differently) so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there’s no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do… pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server and from /c/selfhosted have been testing it fairly successfully and i’ve been on top of bug fixing). Last BIG thing to do is coming up with a good name for the official release, I’ll create a community poll for it and ask opinions on the repo discussion tabs too.

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

Let me know what you think, ask any questions and feel free to join our discord (link in releases page on any of my apps) for a more direct chat about things <3

  • pewpew@feddit.it
    2·
    13 hours ago

    Neat idea but I could just switch search engines when I don’t find what I’m looking for. Usually I just use DDG and I very rarely have to switch engines so this is completely overkill for my needs. But I’d like to have custom bangs, I just started using the DDG ones and it saves me a lot of time

    • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
      2·
      13 hours ago

      firefox has bangs, bonus for not sending all your queries through a us company.

  • LLMhater1312@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    16 hours ago

    Aren’t they gonna send a cease and desist for having a logo that looks like theirs? I know parodies are legal but they will pursue it aggressively, no?

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      16 hours ago

      I think it’d be a very bad look for a company the size of Google to file something against a tiny open source application.

      Colors are slightly different, the word “Google” can’t be copyrighted and it’s an aggregator and not an engine, that said I do want to rebrand before going out of beta, mostly due to this being impossible to find when searching for it 😆

      • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
        7·
        15 hours ago

        Funny thing about that (/s) is that they’re basically required to go after “misuse” of trademarks and such. Letting small company X do it could invalidate any efforts to stop large company Y from doing it.

        Also Google DGAF about optics.

        • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
          3·
          15 hours ago

          I’d have a read here :)

          https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/pledge/

          Whilst you’re generally right, Google does not have a history of suing open source projects and they very much care about optics in this specific aspect (at least so far and for now). Whilst I’m not a fan generally, it’s undeniable how much they contribute to open source in general :) it’s always good to give credits where credits are due as it’s the kind of behaviour we want to encourage you know

  • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
    7·
    19 hours ago

    Super impressed by this based on first impressions! Searxng never seemed robust when I used it (not hosting my own), this feels a lot more solid. I guess that could also be due to less traffic, as I’m only using public instances.

    I am pretty happy with Qwant recently, but might either try this as my default search or as my first fallback option when Qwant fails. Amazing work!

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      17 hours ago

      Well yeah, the absolute best way to make sure you get consistent results would be to privately selfhost this of course! There aren’t enough public instances yet, hopefully more people step forward ♥️

  • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    61·
    17 hours ago

    I commented on this the other day, considering trying it because searxng’s theming options are lacking, but then I came across this and noticed they’re in here too, so looks like it’s definitely time to spin this up and give it a shot 🫡

    (tbh after looking through this list I have a LOT to replace on my stack… time to get moving I guess)

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      17 hours ago

      Ha! I remember! Yeah I tried to make theming as easy as possible, you’ll see if you decide to make a custom theme!

      One note about that list, I don’t think I’d call “slopware” a project that decides to enable codepilot to initially scan code reviews 😆 that’s what it says next to searxng, that list feels a little too strict and almost having some sort of agenda, I’d say 80% of the internet should be in there if we go by these criterias lol

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
      24·
      21 hours ago

      I learned about whoogle the other day from a tweet, very different tech and principles overall, this is more of an alternative to searxng, but regardless, alternatives make the internet a better place ♥️🫡

  • Lunar@lemmy.ml
    4·
    18 hours ago

    this is amazing!

    is there a way to pass “before:2022” with this thing? or otherwise set a cutoff year to the search results? doing so is pretty much the only way to get AI-free image search results nowadays.

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      17 hours ago

      I’ll look into it, depends if the engines allow that natively and is part of the URL search query

    • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      21 hours ago

      Hi! Probably, I tend to add translations to all my apps if they become popular enough anyway… do you mean to geolocate searches or to translate?

      Both possible, technically, but geolocation may be a bit tougher Feel free to open a feature request on GitHub so I don’t forget ♥️