Mojeek Updates, Mid-December 2022

In January we’re looking to bundle all of this together into a blogpost much like the November one, but here’s a quick summary of some things we’ve recently put out just to keep you all in the loop.

  • New focus dashboard layout - the main way you interact with Focus creation, backup etc. has been updated a bit (this is from a private window so is a starting from 0 setup) with Templates put down the bottom, and what we think is a bit more of a navigable setup. On top of this, it allows for the adding of more Mojeek Templates at the bottom without messing around with the UI - this is something we’re looking to do in the New Year.

  • Precise location improvement - if you’re using Mojeek to set your location, and therefore affect the results you’re seeing, the Precise option, which interacts with your browser, has been updated. So getting from image 1 (broad) to image 2 (precise, in my case :smile: ) should be better.

  • Calculator improvement - we discovered that this wasn’t triggering with parentheses, such as in the case of 5/(5+5) and a fix for this has now been pushed.

  • Conversion box improvement - before this wasn’t consistently pulling through values, so now if you do a search like 1 ounce to grams the conversion fields are now populated with the value within the query.

As with all of these, if you see something amiss then please let us know :pray:

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I don’t mean to be demanding, but I would like to express my continued interest in a currency converter. Definitely the number one widget I use. Unlike a calculator, which I have an offline program for, you need to connect to a server somewhere to source exchange rates.

Is there a way to get to a list of the widgets/boxes in one of the menus? I often don’t know what precisely to type to get them to show up.

(noticed there’s a temperature converter, which is nice)

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Not at all, a great deal of things which make it into our workflow come from things that people ask for and feedback is always useful, even if it’s not something we’re immediately able to implement/start work on, or coming during a busy period.

I’m not sure if there’s an open issue for currency, so I’ll raise this and reference your request, and I’ll do something separate for the widgets listing. We have a separate call out in /support for the calculator itself so it possibly fits there as a page/pages, or just something to aggregate these so you can easily see what type of search is going to trigger that functionality.

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Thanks for looking into it! As an Australian, almost everyone’s prices on the internet are in USD. I’m sure it’s a similar situation for other non-Americans.

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No worries, it has been raised and will be discussed. To explain a bit more, we’ve been cautious about adding things like this in the past because it means picking a provider and escalating them up to the top of the results. We’ve always tried to work to provide directions and not be the destination.

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That’s a perfectly understandable concern given that Google’s modus operandi has been to pull as much content as possible from third-party sites into “Instant Answers”, as Duckduckgo would call them.

My opinion is that, for questions like “how to cook a bagel”, pulling instructions out into the search engine results is going too far. On the other hand, questions like, “What’s the temperature today in Shibuya?” and “What is 1USD worth in AUD?” are very small/systematic answers that are easy to plug into an API. Most visitors will not meaningfully differentiate between providers for these questions in the way they might between https://based.cooking and an SEO-crammed site with filler paragraphs.

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