Thanks for the reply @Colin, regarding the UI, please have a look at my previous original post - Modern"ify" the UI
I know you folks have different tasks to be completed on your to-do list, but please do revisit and re think about giving more importance to improving the UI design on Mojeek (hopefully give it more priority in your to-do list), as for my thoughts on how we can improve it, check the attached link above.
I talked with @Tom at the time when the post was made, I assume he is the UI/UX designer, after our conversation in that post, he said this is in the timeline in the coming future.
My concern is, user experience can be immensely improved by making the UI more modern and attractive enough for users to search and use Mojeek, the old school look that Mojeek currently has may be fine with hard-core existing Mojeek users, but as a new user, i promise you that i would have switched to Mojeek a lot sooner if the UI was better. As I said, i have shared Mojeek in my known circle and one of the common feedback I got was that the UI wasnt nice to use, it felt outdated compared to all the other search engines like DDG, Neeva, Google and etc as they have kept their UI updated over the years. We can use it as an opportunity to do something better and different with the UI as well and rethink about how this or that could work, making Mojeek more usable and visually pleasing.
Next one is Ads, which I think Mojeek could think about taking a different direction. I feel like we are kind of conservative in the area, while DuckDuckGo has done a good job with their ads showing based on keywords you search for instead of doing it based on your personal data like Google, this has already been done with DuckDuckGo, if we want to be seen in the market, we should definitely think about doing something different, giving advertisers a reason to advertise their content on Mojeek over DuckDuckGo. So if we adapt to what Yep.com has done (which btw, doesn’t have to be 90/10, you could even take 20% of the ad revenue giving the rest 80 percent back to content creators/advertisers, instead of 90%). At the end of the day, my point is we should try to think differently or maybe take a different approach towards things, so we can stand out of the crowd. We have already done that by having our own index, being independent, why not look into how we can achieve that with ads?
EDIT: Just finished a new post on design mockup for Mojeek, check this out!