Mojeek: Search results independent of Google, Microsoft, and Yandex

varsha

Most search engines retrieve their results from Google or Bing. UK-based Mojeek is building a search engine from the ground up – with an independent search index and algorithm. We talk to new CEO Colin Hayhurst.

Click here to see the full blog post

mossman

Very interesting article.

I'd heard about Mojeek a few times but wasn't motivated to really try using them. After reading this I must remember to use their engine instead of DuckDuckGo to see how it goes...

Pesala

The image search results are poor:

Asoka, Images with Mojeek

Asoka, Images with Ecosia

mtaki14

@Pesala It seems to use third parties for image search (pixabay and bing from what I can see). So if you choose bing as the search engine you should get same/similar results to ecosia which uses bing as base.

philippeoffner

Interesting article. It is worth trying this search engine on a longer term in current use and not only on a few examples.

Chas4

There is a lot to index and that takes a bit of computer power and time

ricardoscotland

@gwen-dragon: Greetings, I'm a developer within Mojeek and just wanted to mention you can customise the title length with tlen=100 (the number of characters you like) and also the snippet with dlen=100 , to whatever suits you. At the moment the lengths are comparable with other major engines that index the English speaking web.

Although it is not customisable by cookie at the moment, it soon shall be. We take user feedback on board and have this ability to customise to your own preferences. Hope that helps.

Pathduck

@Gwen-Dragon said in Mojeek: Search results independent of Google, Microsoft, and Yandex:

"Domina de" which can be mistaken as ad for some

Domina.de seems safe enough. For now. I wonder what's coming

I like Mojeek, nice clean page and decent results.

Wish there was a way to set a dark theme in URL parameters without having to save a cookie. Maybe there is but I wasn't able to find any docs about it. Att: @ricardoscotland

ricardoscotland

@pathduck: I'd be interested in your reasons for not allowing the cookie. The cookie is absolutely in no way tie-able to anything related to you. If you use private sessions or reject cookies then I can understand that. Is that the case? I can pass that information on if you feel it's important for your experience.

Pathduck

@ricardoscotland Thanks for the reply

Well, it more a matter of wanting to avoid the buildup of unnecessary stuff. I run Cookie Autodelete and I'd need to white-list your site to avoid the theme cookie getting reset. I try to avoid whitelisting sites where I don't actually need to keep a login session. It's not really for privacy reasons, like I said more for convenience. Less cookies from less domains = less to care about

I do the same in DDG (kae=t) and StartPage (t=dark) for instance. Would be nice to have the same in Mojeek. There really should be URL parameters for all settings, like the dlen=100 argument.

Is there a documentation of all the available parameters?

ricardoscotland

@pathduck: There are your search preferences here (but are cookie based - https://www.mojeek.com/preferences )

There's also the search parameters here https://www.mojeek.com/support/search-operators.html

As I understand it the tlen and dlen (and potentially dark mode) customisation via GET params are undocumented. I'll speak with the team and will update this post when dark mode can be turned on via URL as well as the other tweaking params. Thanks for your feedback, appreciated.

opus2000

No support for wildcards (e.g. "custom*" matches "customer", "customs", "customary" etc. etc.) ?

ricardoscotland

@pathduck: &theme=dark will load pages on Mojeek in dark mode

Pathduck

@ricardoscotland Pure barry!

One wee thing though: Clicking the "Next" and other internal links will remove the parameter again. Maybe you could set the cookie if theme=dark is sent? Then it would be valid for the current search session, which is fine. Would save you having to rewrite every link, but I think it's good practice to keep URL parameters anyway.

If we could set max. results per page in the same way, that'd be sweet too

ricardoscotland

@pathduck: Cheers for the feedback again, much appreciated.

&t=40 can set the number of results. I'll ask the team to take a look at passing the theme param onwards.

ricardoscotland

@opus2000: Hello opus2000. Wildcards for the end of words are not available but you can do queries such as wooden * leg where the * can represent any word. Hope that's of use to you.

Pathduck

@ricardoscotland Hi, I was just testing something in regards to another thread here, and Mojeek gives a 403 Forbidden if searching with a string like this:
https://www.mojeek.com/search?theme=dark&t=40&q="testing this"

Also happens in other browsers so I assume an error on your side?

ricardoscotland

@pathduck: Hello again pathduck, thanks for highlighting that issue.

This seems to be in reference to a previous topic you've seen here regarding Vivaldi and URL encoding. https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/40634/privacy-and-the-rise-of-the-alternative-search-engine?lang=en-US - though it would also happen when a manually typed out URL is incorrectly encoded (and pasted it the URL bar into any browser hitting Mojeek)

We will be looking into it this week again to see if an exception can be made for Vivaldi as typically the incorrect encoding can be seen an indicator of automated traffic. It would've been more simple of Vivaldi reported their original UA rather than Chromium's but it is what it is. Much appreciated you pointed it out (and adding a + between your query words fixes the issue as you no doubt know)

Pathduck

@ricardoscotland Yes, I also reported (VB-57136) the issue of Vivaldi not encoding spaces with "+" as other browsers. They seem reluctant to change it, maybe because not encoding means it's easier to edit the string directly in the URL? But how many users actually do that? No idea why they've not changed it.

Obviously manually adding a '+' instead of spaces is not going to happen.

It would be simpler if Vivaldi just encoded their search string "properly" (or, as others do) instead of search engines having to create exceptions for Vivaldi. Then again, other search engines don't bail out on non-encoded spaces in search strings

Catweazle

@AlexGarcia , like this one?