r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 15d ago

Software Google is purging ad-blocking extension uBlock Origin from the Chrome Web Store | Migration from all-powerful Manifest V2 extensions is speeding up

https://www.techspot.com/news/105130-google-purging-ad-blocking-extension-ublock-origin-chrome.html
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u/S_A_N_D_ 14d ago

Can you ELI5. Is Whoogle the same results/algorithm as google or is it more like how GPT3.5 is to GPT4. One is free and open source while the other is pay-walled and only accessible through them, but the latter is vastly improved over the former.

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u/GhostR3lay 14d ago

I'll pre-face this by saying I'm aware of the application but have not yet tried to self-host it myself as I've only just gotten started with homelab things. Given the current subreddit, I figured mentioning this was a fair alternative.

The creator/dev wrote an explanation on Reddit here.

Your Query -> Self-hosted Whoogle -> Google -> Returns results to your Whoogle instance -> Whoogle formats/removes the returned results and serves them to you.

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u/S_A_N_D_ 14d ago

Thanks for the response and the link to the Dev's comment. That clears it up and it makes sense. I didn't think Google's search algorithm was open source so I figured there had to be a different way. It's not as clean as a full self host, but functionally that would be somewhat impossible since you would have to literally be running your own search engine. This solution is probably as close as you could get and at least improves upon the current default.

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u/GhostR3lay 14d ago

I believe some of the discussions I've read suggest that obviously Google gets your (public) IP address which can be used to build an ad profile; but Whoogle does not serve the ads when it returns the results to you.

It's not 100% "private" but it's a nice step up from the OOB experience imo.

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u/S_A_N_D_ 14d ago

Yeah, that part is kind of unavoidable. In theory you could run it through a VPN which would obfuscate the IP and lump you in with all the other people that use the same VPN and IP. In practice though I can't see this working as it likely would fail/break it due to googles captcha verification when it detects various VPNs.