I can’t speak for Mojeek, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as an “unbiased” search engine. If an engine was “unbiased”, rankings wouldn’t exist. There are various ways of determining relevance; AFAIK Google’s algorithm tends to rely on biases it believes you have. If your algorithm determines relevance based solely on SEO keywords, you’re going to end up with a lot of junk. See part of Seirdy’s post on Search Engines:
No search engine is truly unbiased. Most engines’ ranking algorithms incorporate a method similar to PageRank, which biases them towards sites with many backlinks. Search engines have to deal with unwanted results occupying the confusing overlap between SEO spam, shock content, and duplicate content. When this content’s manipulation of ranking algos causes it to rank high, engines have to address it through manual action or algorithm refinement. Choosing to address it through either option, or choosing to leave it there for popular queries after receiving user reports, reflects bias.
I think many would find Mojeek’s biases less objectionable than Google/Bing’s if they viewed a search engine purely as a tool. If you’re searching for Russian news sites, even if the content is purely a reproduction of the Kremlin’s script, you probably want to see Russian news sites.
That said, yes, I don’t tend to get what I’m looking for quickly depending on the complexity. Colin suggested one way this could be improved in the future in this great response, where he shares the concept of personalisation options where you can promote/demote sites based on your preferences and more:
On our chosen path of independence, we have been building the ability to explore premium/subscription services. We will have specific news to share on that very soon; a little taster, if you have not seen before, is here. It is a new product that we restarted work on last year. Version 1 is now nearing completion. The roots of this go back to February 2006 when Mojeek “Personal Search” was announced. More details were reported on here in September 2006. This project was put aside to concentrate on building the Mojeek general web search engine that you use, and we run today. The new product is something that we are intending to bring to this community first, ahead of any general release and after internal testing.
Another issue is that, while Mojeek’s index is large (5 billion pages!), Google and Bing have much larger indexes, so they have more to work with. For instance, Mojeek does not index any pages in Japanese, so it won’t return any results when you use a Japanese search term (it gives you a 403 Forbidden, actually). Conversely, as Mojeek’s index grows larger, it will be able to serve you better results.
One way to help improve Mojeek’s results is to provide feedback when you don’t get the result you’re looking for, using the “Submit feedback” button in the bottom right corner when searching.