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
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?
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 😆
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.
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
@fccview @BrianTheeBiscuiteer as much as I hate Google, it's executives and everything they stand for, I 100% agree that credit where credit is dua should always be the route. This is what separates us from them. Not lying to further our philosophy is how we maintain open and transparent discussions about technology the right way.
Absolutely ♥️