I like that there is a search engine such as this, but it is like every other modern search engine it has NOTHING on pre-2009 google, and still follows many of the enshittified anti-patterns of modern google.
I noticed that you are giving altered matches, a query for “engine” such as in “search engine” or “game engine” returns “engineer”, which is obviously bollocks/nonsense. When google started doing this is when it really first became useless in my opinion. This type of semantic redirection needs to go, I need matches for the terms I entered not for what the engine thinks it knows better than me that I thought I needed but didn’t.
Giving partial matches or similar matches is fine, but they need to appear after the exact matches and not override what was entered thinking it knows better.
At first you could negate the unwanted word with a minus, e.g. search engine -engineer, but support for this feature is sparse among search engines now, and mojeek does not have it. In my opinion this is critical for filtering out results that are popular, altered, or highly ranked or SEO honeypots, but are not what you are actually looking for. A search engine without negation is basically useless, which means all of them nowadays.
Negation is just one part of the set of boolean operators, another very useful feature that has been completely dropped by modern search engines for no apparent reason.
Another powerful tool was the ability to search site indexes or ftp using the intitle:indexof command, which may be able to locate files that are not directly linked on a page. Also removed from all modern search engines.
An operator reference card or page for all this would be nice to have too.
And finally the real reason google became dominant in the 2000’s is not just because of better results, but because of better localized results, all other search engines at the time were for america only, google was the only company at the time to realize there is a world outside the coasts, and gave the same good results for international queries.
