I’m searching for local businesses quite often lately. This made think that this might be a great use case for a Mojeek focus: Filtering websites that are from businesses within a certain radius.
I realise that this is not yet possible today and it’s probably difficult to implement as well. How are you going to determine the location of a website owner? At first, I was thinking about schema.org tags in a website, but what about business directories that have schema.org on every business profile?
A second solution could be to look at info on openstreetmaps. Perhaps it might be possible to leverage Mojeek maps to pull this off. But today’s situation is that business owners usually don’t add their business to openstreetmaps. With their limited time, I think the insensitive for managing a listing on openstreetmaps isn’t big enough. If business owners do decide to manage a local business listing, they are practically always managing their Google Business Listing. With the current state of things, I’m not sure if there’s a big enough quantity and quality to build a focus function as described above.
I’m not sure if this feature would ever be possible, but I wanted to share it here. Perhaps it is possible at some point. Perhaps it might inspire you for another feature.
With that being said, perhaps a filter that would allow us to search for websites in a particular language is an option? There is a seeting that allows me to set a prefered search results language. I’m not sure how this works and what it does, but I do know that when I set this, the results are not limited to the set language. The first results even include in many cases results in other languages, in my experience. Perhaps a search moderator or focus would allow me to obly keep results in a certain language?
Thank you for sharing these thoughts @Videonas. As you say one way to tackle this would be maps. You are correct that not many businesses are listed on openstreetmaps.
In case you are not aware there are both location and language settings in Mojeek, which can be selected in Settings, Preferences:
I think the better question is whether Mojeek has already indexed those pages. I noticed that in my country, even our government websites haven’t been indexed yet. This is rather expected as most search engines also have great difficulty with local results, but this sadly means that I’m not getting out of Google’s grasp anytime soon.
Another issue is whether Mojeek can detect languages. It’s quite common for me to encounter results on a different language. Then there’s the unresolvable problem on stemming, producing irrelevant results at least half of the time.
There are still a lot of obstacles that Mojeek need to face before local results become feasible, at least in my country.
We are able to detect languages yes; in order to understand these better we could do with some examples - location, browser language, and the query which is being used - so we can look into them.
We find this one strange as when there is negative feedback, it’s quite a rarity for it to be linked to stemming. As above, if you’re able to send these examples in for us to look at then it would be a massive help. Either here or using the Submit Feedback button on results pages
