Has Mojeek used AI (machine learning) for building its index?

I’m not advocating for or against machine learning with this question; I just wanted to know.

I was reading this Forbes article: The 10 Best Examples Of How AI Is Already Used In Our Everyday Life

Which was linked from this Ars article: Poll: AI poses risk to humanity, according to majority of Americans | Ars Technica

One of the sections claims:

Search engines couldn’t scan the entire internet and deliver what you want without the assistance of artificial intelligence.

Now, I thought,“that can’t be true for every search engine.” But I don’t know for sure, really, so I thought I’d ask.

Incidentally, a lot of the items on this list of “10 AI-enabled services we use daily” tend to be privacy-invasive:

  • Social Media
  • Smart Home Devices
  • Google Maps
  • Amazon
  • Google Assistant & Amazon Alexa

Now, personally, I can’t say I agree with this:

Soo, it will be hard to imagine any of our daily routines without the help of AI.

I don’t use any of the items on this list aside from banking apps, but the AI-powered features are more auxiliary than anything. I don’t know of any reliable AI-powered features. Machine translation for a compatible language pair has gotten quite mature (even if not fully reliable, especially for very alien language pairs like JP>EN), but I stopped using those tools and decided to learn the language instead.

I do think AI-powered services can be very convenient in certain cases. For instance, I’m finding Kagi’s Universal Summarizer very useful for a lot of applications: Universal Summarizer by Kagi

Mojeek is a keyword based information retrieval system. With regard to “Search engines couldn’t scan the entire internet and deliver what you want without the assistance of artificial intelligence.” This is not true. However machine learning might usefully support search. We have been experimenting with it, from ranking to summarisation. Retrieval using keywords can sometimes be the best method. So I would expect anything we do will always be a hybrid of keyword and machine learning methods.

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