You don’t want to use exceptions in normal control flow, because they’re extremely slow. Every time you throw
an exception, it has to collect a stacktrace, which is hundreds, if not thousands, of calculations, compared to a handful of calculations for returning a boolean or an enum variant.
Hmm, I don’t know anything about Whoogle, but from other privacy-conscious search engines, I would expect it to work when you use that URL in your bookmark.
Three things I can imagine: