Favicons would make results in Mojeek easier to parse. It’s readable without, but it would be improvement.
As I understand it, there is a privacy issue with favicons depending on the implementation. That is, if you link the favicons directly from the website, then the user’s browser will go to the website and fetch them. Probably with a Referer [sic] Header. I suppose a private implementation would involve Mojeek proxying all the favicons.
Which would be considerable storage given the billions of sites out there.
I was just curious whether this had already been considered and for that reason favicons won’t be implemented, or that this feature is just not a priority. I know this feature has been raised in the past but I didn’t see the privacy issue raised yet
I do like favicons in SERPs, it reinforces signals to known websites more quickly.
I’ve taken up a few programming tasks of grabbing favicons on websites and it can involve a fair few requests, beyond favicon.ico existing it can involve fetching a page, maybe looking at some sort of manifest file referenced on that page and then picking a size.
Thanks for bringing this up. Yes, it would make them more readable. We would, of course, enable an option to turn them off for those that prefer not to have them.
As you mention this has been raised before and is pretty high on the most wanted features list. We develop this list based on input here, and also from various sources (emails, survey, social media).
So yes we have considered it, and as you realise we would have to do some more work to make it no-tracking.
We have been, and are working on features that are more of a priority and which correlate with the inputs we get. Those are search relevance improvements of which there are many changes made every day which you don’t see, and bigger challenges notably recency, location, and semantic matching.
