Add "sort by popularity" and other sort options?

Feedback and Developments
1

Something that could really distinguish a contender search engine is the ability to really choose/switch how the results are ranked, like you do when you’re viewing the contents of a folder on a computer. So there could be a little “sort by” menu that defaults to “Mojeek algorithm”, which you could change to stuff like “last modified” and “size”.

Being able to rank the results by the popularity of the host name (using an external source of truth like Similarweb or Majestic Million) would be useful for me on many occasions. I do like how Mojeek often surfaces small or obscure websites, but there are times when it would be handy for me to flick to a view of my results that prioritises the busiest or most high-profile sites. The risk of focussing on the busiest sites is that popular sites stay popular and obscure sites stay obscure, but, if it’s offered as an option (rather than baked into the algorithm), then the user is consciously asking for it when they want it, and Mojeek is being completely transparent about how it’s sorting the results.

If the user was engaging with this feature, you might have to restrict it to the first hundred results or something for it to be useful or meaningful. In a situation with millions of results, you probably don’t want the 1,064,887th result jumping all the way to the top because it happens to be the newest or biggest. If the user has searched for a phrase, then the millionth result probably isn’t related to their search term anyway and just contains the individual words.

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This is an interesting concept for sure, and something which has been discussed before. It also definitely lines up with The alternative search engine that puts the people who use it first.

There’s a decent quantity of work ongoing with interesting functionality and other things, but we will for sure keep it in mind, thanks :pray:

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Based on my experience on Reddit, I can see potential in a sort options feature. Reddit has several, where “hot” would raise posts that have the most active discussion, while “new” would give the latest ones, useful for fast moving topics.

Mojeek could implement a similar feature, though they may need to be careful on the “sort by popularity”, be able to distinguish accidental clicks from those that users enjoyed reading, to avoid that option being populated by SEO garbage.