// the take
Whoogle was a self-hosted Flask app that scraped Google's no-JS search results to give you ad-free, cookie-free, tracker-free search you could run on your own box or for free-tier PaaS. As of July 2026 the README is honest that it's dead: Google killed the last user-agent strings that worked without JavaScript, and the maintainer has stopped shipping fixes, reviewing PRs, or supporting existing deployments.
The UA rotation system (auto-generating and cycling Safari UAs across restarts, with a safe fallback) was a reasonable attempt at outrunning Google's blocking, and the codebase is small enough to actually read end to end (routes.py, request.py, a handful of utils). Deployment story was genuinely good for its time — one-click Heroku/Fly/Render/Replit, a Helm chart, multi-arch Docker images, and a real test suite with mocked Google responses so you weren't hitting the live scrape target in CI. The JSON output mode and content-negotiation API gave it a programmatic interface beyond the HTML UI.
It doesn't work anymore — this is the headline issue, not a footnote: the core scrape-without-JS mechanism it was built on is gone and the maintainer has explicitly closed the door on fixes, PRs, or support. The announced fallback (BYOK Google Custom Search) is also called out in the same README as no longer viable, so there's no supported path forward, only a fork-it-yourself MIT license. Architecturally it was always fragile by design: scraping an unversioned HTML surface you don't control means every Google layout or bot-detection change is an existential risk, which is exactly what killed it. ARMv7 support was already dropped in v1.2.0 for unrelated Alpine/crypto-library reasons, so even the hardware story was narrowing before the final shutdown.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →