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Mojeek – The alternative search engine that puts the people who use it first
- rekabis 2y agoI put in a word that I know would bring back at least 1,000 results that use that word precisely, and in its entirety. It didn’t bring back a single one. I got a whole lot of results that had parts of that word, or looked similar to that word, but nothing with an exact match. That word is not only a well-used German slang for a common vegetable (so, present in hundreds of online recipes), which is also used throughout the Middle East (food reviews and online menus), but it’s also a part of several company’s names (not related to the slang term) mainly because it’s also a German last name (online biographies and Wikipedia entries). Clearly, this search engine has a long way to go before it comes close to being minimally functional.
- mncsz 2y ago[dead]
- anonu 2y agofeels pretty good from just a few searches. I used DDG for some time as an alternative to google. In the end I had to switch back to google - the quality just wasn't as good as google's. Mojeek appears to have been around for 20+ years... is the business model just to sell search APIs to others?
- upon_drumhead 2y agoI've been using DDG for a few years now, but while I think the quality isn't there compared to Google 8 years ago, it seems reasonably similar to Google as of now.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoThe business model includes ads, according to their website.
- nhggfu 2y agoyuk i typed in the query "gambling industry news". 1st result was a category page on a junky affiliate site, with last post date Sunday 25 July 2010
- PrivacyDingus 2y agoMojeek employee here, will raise this to be looked into, can you let me know which country you're searching from so we can replicate it? Cheers
- ramesh31 2y agoUntil the people with money offer them enough of it
- ttla 2y agoSo... an ad-based search engine? Sounds familiar. The alternative needed is an alternative business model
- xmprt 2y agokagi exists. If you're not already using that then I'm not sure what other alternative business model you can ask for.
- ttla 2y agoIndeed, I use Kagi daily. My point above was simply that this company looks like it will be subject to the same incentive problems as almost all other search engines, Kagi being the exception.
- gregw134 2y agoAll we need is to show less SEO and more sites made with passion, that have communities involved in them, etc.
- bogwog 2y agoAka things made by real people and not marketing drones. Unfortunately, all the "real people" are only publishing things on closed-off social media sites instead of the wider internet, so the majority of things outside of those sites is either crap nobody wants to read, or mono-culture nerd/tech blogs from people like us.
- mythz 2y agoCurrently in search for an alternative search engine to Google or Bing, used DDG for a while but found Brave's Search [1] structured results more useful which is now my default. So far so good but if Brave enshittifies their results may consider having to pay for kagi.com. [1] https://search.brave.com https://search.brave.com
- sixothree 2y agoTry Kagi for sure. It’s a tool in my belt.
- Cerium 2y agoBeyond a tool in my belt, Kagi has been my go to since the day I heard about it.
- mortify 2y agoSearch engines go through cycles of usefulness. I was using qwant for over a year, but their relevance has dropped off. I'm very happy with startpage at the moment as my Google searches continue to drop. Perplexity (AI) is providing better augmentation than Google.
- hollowturtle 2y agoThere certainly is a need for an alternative to google search, maybe not ads based. It’s something that’s often discussed here on HN or elsewhere. Whether it being brave search, ddg, kagi search or whatever. Thing is I doubt the next “google search” killer will be a traditional search engine at all, like this Mojeek, and I can’t see something like Kagi attracting the masses(who never paid for search) with a paid subscription, it’s very clear to me that their business model is a niche business model. I don’t want to say the inflated word of todays news, but my feeling is the only way to kill google search is to not directly compete with them but rather have something disruptive like an llm is. Direct competition is a dirty and expensive business, and sooner or later you must turn profitable, where do you think the company will turn against in order to make a profit? Funny thing is that I believe that Google knows this and jeopardize his own business with cramped Gemini in search
- laserbeam 2y agoAlthough niche, and not aiming to be a google killer, kagi is profitable (according to a post blog post from May this year https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi#1 https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi#1 ). So, who knows. Other search engines may actually live in a market owned by google...
- janalsncm 2y ago> I can’t see something like Kagi attracting the masses For me it’s less about paying and more about having to log in and attach a payment profile. I’m sure the creators of Kagi are nice people, I just don’t trust whoever they may someday sell it to.
- rustcleaner 2y agoI pay their highest package on one account which has hardly a search run with it, and just make new trial accounts in VMs for my searching generally. If they ever plug the hole, I stop paying and move on. I am paying max to tip them, maintain privacy, and not be a mooching degenerate.
- janalsncm 2y agoIn their article “Independent and Unbiased Search Results” I believe Mojeek fundamentally misunderstands the goal of a search engine. There is no such thing as an unbiased search engine. The entire purpose of a search engine is to be biased towards relevance. The opposite of biased isn’t fair, it is random. If you search for “cars” what should the engine show you? There are likely billions of pages containing the word. (And for some queries, the correct page won’t even contain an exact string match.) If you want to create a useful ranking, your first few results need to have identified the correct intent but also be sensitive to timeliness and location. https://blog.mojeek.com/2018/08/independent-and-unbiased-search-results.html https://blog.mojeek.com/2018/08/independent-and-unbiased-sea...
- mellosouls 2y agoThe entire purpose of a search engine is to be biased towards relevance. The opposite of biased isn’t fair, it is random. The opposite of "biased" is "unbiased" - as in the title - meaning neutral or impartial here and I think you are possibly misinterpreting the context. The blog entry you link to is from 2018, at the height of the culture wars when the big tech players including Google were being criticised for pushing political agendas in what they displayed to the user. The (marketing) claim here is clearly suggesting Mojeek does not use an ideological filter.
- danpalmer 2y agoI don't think things are this simple though. Spaces that attempt to either have no moderation, end up over-representing those who hit up against moderation elsewhere. Having moderation requires having an opinion, and the opinion ultimately becomes the product.
- mellosouls 2y agoUndoubtedly it's a difficult task, but I think there are degrees to which you can at least have a decent go at good faith moderation (eg see HN) and the article is appealing to a perspective that that good faith isn't there.
- poikroequ 2y agoI'm very happy to see this exists! While I support Kagi, I believe they just use Bing API for most search results. We need real alternatives with their own search index. Of course, we need to hamper our expectations. Google reportedly indexed over 400 billion pages in 2020, whereas Mojeek reported just 6 billion pages in 2023. So I'm not expecting to be wowed by Mojeek, but so far it doesn't seem too bad. Actually what excites me about it is it seems to use a more basic keyword search, unlike Google and Bing which are quite liberal in how they interpret your search query. If you're looking for specific keywords or a specific string, you may have better luck using Mojeek.
- promiseofbeans 2y agoKagi displays what portion of results are from their own index - I almost always see 50% or higher on this. I think they also use a mix of several external indexes rather than solely bing. Kagi also has the advantage of letting you customise rankings to your preferences: I've got mine set to always pin a relevant wikipedia article to the very top, and to bubble MDN pages up and w3schools pages down.
- e40 2y ago> Kagi also has the advantage of letting you customise rankings to your preferences: I've got mine set to always pin a relevant wikipedia article to the very top, and to bubble MDN pages up and w3schools pages down. How do you do this? I don't see it in the options.
- hobofan 2y agoFor a search result you can click on the shield icon, and select the ranking preference for the results of that domain. You can also manually add domains here: https://kagi.com/settings?p=user_ranked https://kagi.com/settings?p=user_ranked
- vishnumohandas 2y agoKagi uses Mojeek's index as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20231105004927/https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231105004927/https://help.kagi...
- fatfox 2y agoAny alternative search engine that has its own, independent index is worth supporting, imo. Mojeek results have overall been useful the last couple of times I used it and the team actually responds to search feedback.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ttctciyf 2y agoLots of HN Q&A with their CEO from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372401 I was a bit surprised that on my first visit to the main mojeek search page the "No tracking. Just search" text entry field was prepopulated with a few suggestions that are personally relevant, possibly from reddit searches I've made! Is this something the browser manages, or is there some tracking after all, I wonder?
- ricardo81 2y agoThat's your browser
- deskr 2y agoLink straight to the search page: https://www.mojeek.com/ https://www.mojeek.com/ I'm definitely going to try this out along with my Google search, since Google is feeding me so much shit every day.
- ilius2 2y agoJust testing it out, I searched "linux", and results are: unix.stackexchange.com Wikipedia article archlinux.org ubuntu.com linux.com (finally) It seems to favor online exposure over relevance a bit too much IMO. For example Ubuntu is more popular than Arch, but Arch users visit their distro's website much more frequently. And few Linux users ever visit linux.com.
- ilius2 2y agoDuckDuckGo results: linux.com linux.com Wikipedia article redhat.com ubuntu.com linux.com (again)
- ilius2 2y agoI will keep using it and comparing it with DuckDuckGo! It's kinda fun!
- viraptor 2y agoThis is a kind of query you'd never use in real life though. What is even your expectation when you search "Linux"? If there isn't a specific one, it's not a good test.
- ilius2 2y agoGood point. Now try "Linux download", and the first result is https://www.opera.com/download https://www.opera.com/download. While DuckDuckGo gives you https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ My point still stands (even more).
- sharpshadow 2y agoI’ve tried the quotation marks and “inurl:” couldn’t find the string of the dailymotion video it showed me from the previous search. I really hope there is a spreadsheet somebody can link me to? Edit: All the features work without JS even the pictures which is really nice and it is fast.
- hfjke 2y ago[flagged]
- hilbert42 2y agoMojeek is now my default search engine on most of my computers. As Mojeek has its own crawler, one often gets completely different results to say Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. I've found stuff on it that I've not found on those others. I'm not suggesting you give up the others completely in favor of Mojeek, rather that you use it as an adjunct to them.