Following user feedback from support queries and interviews we have been working on a popular request. This is the wish to carry out search on other search engines and services. We think of this as quick search choices. Some other search services and browsers offer a similar capability sometimes known as bangs. This will be released on Mojeek very soon, so we would like to hear from you about which search engines and services would you like to see supported. We don’t think having hundreds of options is the way forward and will be introducing less than ten options, at least initially. We’ll also be making this user controllable. We are close to deciding the options we will offer intially but we would love to hear your views.
Adding bangs is a good idea as it might increase first use of Mojeek.
Bing and Google - only if you feel you must include. These two are the poster boys for bad tracking behavior and search monopoly on the web so include only if it will benefit Mojeek.
Baidu and Yandex - I have no opinion. I guess it depends on your user demographics.
DDG and Ecosia and Startpage - Yes include. Privacy search engines ought to stick together. These are better alternatives than Google and Bing.
Brave and Gigablast - Yes for Brave. I know Gigablast is still around, but their algo (the quality of their SERP’s) and the size of their index has never impressed me. Maybe that has changed?
I’d suggest MetaGer which is privacy oriented and run by a German non-profit. Even though results are mostly from Bing, MetaGer’s location within the EU might reassure users and it could be a better privacy choice than Gigablast.
Point taken on Bing and Google, obviously. Perhaps we should include a warning message. Perhaps at some stage - right now most Mojeek users will know.
Gigablast we feel should be offered as it is a genuine index with crawler. Quality is an issue and results tend to be slow. But it’s the only other search engine, that is committed to full privacy.
The search services are not fully private in my opnion. It’s known but rarely mentioned that part of your IP address is passed to Microsoft (three octets for at least some of them) and presumably to Google. You are also sending Microsoft and Google data which they use and monetize; supplied via proxy when you use these search services. And funding them directly if you click on ads or indirectly, as the search services pay for their APIs.
Metager is an interesting suggestion but less private than Gigablast for reasons stated . We did wonder also about Qwant (Bing proxy).
Thanks @Marc_van_Breemen and welcome to the community. Brave will definitely be included. Since they are not acting as a proxy, like others, there is certainly more privacy. It’s also a separate index, built from click-query data, rather than crawling as we do Mojeek and the other genuine search engines. With the machine learning ranking model based on that of others (it seems to be correlated with Google as ground truth) you won’t get an independent set of search results. But still what they do, and notably the great work the Cliqz team did, is a positive contribution to the world of search.
Out of these options I particularly like Gigablast, it has its own index and is typo tolerant and also supports synonyms. I also find the ranking is surprisingly good.
Edit: I replied to the wrong post, I meant to reply to the top post. Sorry!
Thanks @Nova for the feedback. Good to know. As you say, Gigablast has an independent index and importantly their own crawler too. The two together are vital as a basis for providing a genuine source of informational diversity.
Okay, @Nova and @Colin, you have convinced me that Gigablast should be included for the reasons cited. Having their own independent index and crawler trumps my reservations. Good call by both of you.
I use Google. So I would like a Google search option. I would then be happy to use Mojeek as my first search and then Google if the Mojeek results don’t satisfy.
I am not familiar with Baidu, Ecosia, Startpage or Gigablast. I use Google for technical information about programming, nothing else. Brave is same as Google without tracking, but still returns censored manipulated results. DuckDuckGo is Google lite, another deep state operation. Bing just plain sucks, like most other Microsoft products. Since Yandex is Russian, they are not controlled by our deep state - no motive to censor and sabotage events like the Canadian trucker protest. So I consider Yandex the most reliable for most stuff that I search for.
Thanks @floughry for sharing your thoughts. DuckDuckGo is actually “Bing” lite; they have never used the Google API as far as we know. They started with Yahoo! but they abandoned their independent search engine and now also use Bing. DuckDuckGo also used Yandex at some point but I don’t think they do so now and exclusively use Microsoft Bing and Azure. The do have their instant answers using verious APIs and some indexin, but predominantly they send search queries, at least and $ for the Bing API calls and get back results and Ads.
As it happens we have just launched Search Choices and you’ll be pleased to know we included Google and Yandex.
Search Choices are now launched. Many thanks for your inputs. I think we have covered all the options mentioned here offering a choice of 8 search engines and services, all under your control and as shown below. You can read the details and how to use it here.
As others have noted, I am averse to using Bing, Google, Yandex or any other that collects or guides more than necessary…especially since we now have real choices. I would add two seach engines: Swisscows and Qwant.
Personally, there are enough healthy alternatives that Mojeek does not have to indiretly support the likes of Bing, Google and their ilk.
Thank you for giving us real options in the crawler/search department.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Last time we checked Swisscows and Qwant are largely a search proxy for Bing. So they are not really search engines but search services; the data and $ sent, results and ads from, Microsoft are thus largely determined by their respective syndication arrangement. We decided to include at least intially Ecosia and DuckDuckGo as the Microsoft syndication partners in the Selection list; similarly Startpage as the search proxy for Google.
We have had varied views on whether we should or not support Google, Bing and Yandex; so we decided to not make them part of the default list of four, which provide some diversity of sources and a healthier attitude to tracking.
Taking into account other inputs we’ll consider what we might add in an next update. We note your suggestion of Swisscows and Qwant, and Metager above from @Brad. In case you don’t know we maintain this https://www.searchenginemap.com/ although it needs an update and works well only on desktop.
Thanks @Colin; yes, they are proxies but they do not share my personal info :). I rather go to those two than directly to Bing, Google, or Yandex directly. Ultimately, I prefer to use Mojeek and only when forced too far off the beaten path do I go to Swisscows and Ecosia…I do use Peekier from time to time as well…getting more comfortable with the format.
Thank you for everything you and the team are doing. It is greatly appreciated. Wish I had found you sooner.
Qwant is actually a hybrid. It’s one of two engines I know of (the other is Neeva) that managed to get permission to modify results fetched via the Bing API. It combines its own results with Bing’s.
IME, the results are somewhat Bing-flavored, but they are definitely not the same. Some results are unique and some results on the first page would be buried five pages deep in Bing; however, the top couple results are typically Bing-identical. I recently had to amend my search indexes article to reflect that.
@seirdy thanks for the comment and for your brilliant article; possibly the best in-depth and most accurate review of the search engine market. It’s hard to follow what Qwant and Neeva do; rather opaque. When I spoke with Neeva it was only Bing but they had intentions to do some indexing. As for Qwant, the last we understood was that they index just French sites. But the company has changed recently and is now partnered with Huawei too, so who know? Anyway yes, you might say hybrid; as indeed you might about DuckDuckGo, and others, if you consider isntant answers and similar. No one I have spoken too, or read content from, externally knows whether DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, to name two, have permission to modify Bing results. Perhaps you can know or can find out. How you would combine results from two indexes without access to the inner scorings/working of the external index is a huge issue; but I’m sure Microsoft don’t give those so I wouldn’t call it a hybrid. I’m sure there’s a better word to use; but for now how about cocktail?
Their integration of their own index was fairly recent when I added them. I’m not able to give details.
I’ve been thinking about splitting up the “semi-independent” section up to distinguish Brave and Kagi from Qwant and Neeva. Rationale:
Brave does have a truly independent index, but it’s designed to be extremely similar to Google. They published a paper on “goggles” to allow users to skew ranking behavior for different purposes. I think these two facts really do make it much more independent than Qwant and Neeva. I’m also tracking certain queries to see how SERPs change with time compared to Google, and have seen a few positive results.
Kagi is actually super interesting, and I think it offers the most unique results in the “semi-independent” category with its non-commerical index and bias: results from its independent sibling Teclis engine do show up, and they’re quite relevant. Kagi also offers “lenses” similar to Brave’s upcoming “goggles”, and its “non-commercial” lens is really quite something. I’m not sure I should give more details, but suffice to say that it really does go out of its way to properly integrate both mainstream sources and its Teclis index, rather than just inserting them randomly.
I should also add that reverse-engineering Google and Bing is something that lots of these engines engage in. Not receiving scoring data hasn’t stopped Brave (well, Cliqz at the time) and at least two other engines from coming up with their own way to determine ranking factors at play. A common strategy is to compare changes over time between their own SERPs and GBY’s and monitoring pages for changes that could trigger them, feeding these “change signals” into their own models. Cliqz’ tech blog detailed something similar: https://www.0x65.dev/
Whoops, that went off-topic. I’m not sure Kagi could work well for “search choices” since it requires logging in; perhaps integration in the opposite direction (i.e. a Mojeek “search choice” visible on Kagi) is a better option.
A search-choices initiative across multiple search engines with unique-looking results could be mutually beneficial. If multiple independent indexes can share some information/integration, it could allow them to collectively improve enough to gain some mindshare. This might not be a zero-sum game because most players don’t have much to lose.
A simple set of links to other engines at the bottom of the SERP is a good starting point.
Other engines I’d like to see featured: Right Dao, and some language-specific options depending on the user’s locale (e.g. Seznam, Naver, Baidu, etc).
@Seirdy, I think you are either in a pretty small group or wholly unique in this respect; please don’t hesitate to share whatever you write on this when you do here, I’d be extremely interested to read it.
On digression, no worries at all, that contribution is very valuable. The need to be logged in for Kagi would definitely mean that it’d be an inclusion that would result in some dissatisfying journeys for a lot of people, we should look into the others though.
