I also don’t see Mojeek as directly competing with Google (different segments, targets, positioning models—from my perspective, at least.).
But Mojeek isn’t profitable, and in order to become profitable, it needs to gain users from other search engines. An overwhelming majority of these users are on Google, but even to win over the ones who are on Duckduckgo or any other service my reasoning above still applies: it needs to provide better quality/convenience, or at the very least similar quality – i.e. better results.
It may very well be that creating the ultimate morally good search engine is an unprofitable feat in a society of selfish agents where 99% of people find privacy to be an acceptable trading currency to exchange for “free” search results.
Now, I don’t believe this is the case, but hopefully you will agree profitability and privacy are on a spectrum (inversely correlated) – there can (and in my opinion of course, should) be reasonable compromises that allow Mojeek to gain more users by improving its results while arguably not invading users’ privacy to any meaningful extent.
I have massive respect for Mojeek for keeping up the effort to build an independent alternative in the search engine landscape: but a privacy-protecting tool is only as impactful as the number of users it has, and in order to gain more, I think some decisions should be challenged. Not tracking users’ clicks is one.
depends on what kind of tracking you’re referring to and since Moj is privacy respecting, i assume the only tracking that would be ethically acceptable is counting search result clicks, which i think is perfectly fine, but i also think there’s utility in being able to turn that off to get more organic results
or, i suppose another way search results stemming from this kind of “tracking” (it’s not really tracking, is it?) could be employed is to use it to present the first ~5 results in a “popular” section, something that might satisfy (nearly) everyone all the time
separating human clicks from bot clicks is another matter
well, in terms of the number of people that will use Moj, i suppose it doesn’t matter as long as it’s profitable, certainly not to me, but in terms of utility, it’s got to be able to compete (my perspective) and for that to happen the index needs to be massively expanded and we all know what that means ($$$)
i take no joy in criticizing Moj, especially on this forum, because it might be disheartening to those who have invested a lot of time, money and effort into this project, but if it can’t replace google, it won’t be fully usable as a general purpose search engine, from my perspective, and i’m pretty sure this is what the company set out to achieve; a general purpose search engine
that said, i think we all see a huge and welcome potential here, it just needs time to grow the index
Just to highlight here; at this point in time our revenue streams also come from B2B (API) sales: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/ and there is work currently being undertaken to expand revenues.
This is a very good point, and bot blocking has come up in this forum before as an issue where a level of balance and constant attention is required. Handing over ranking to clicks could become extremely problematic if someone were to want to game rankings using their bots.
As detailed in the February change article above, we utilize feedback freely given by our users in order to identify wider changes which can be made, putting them through testing afterward. Two ways in which this process can be helped by people here would be:
report the searches that you’ve found to be not-so good so that they can be factored into wider changes; and
if an when something is there to be tested, give it a go and let us know how it works for you.
For anyone who has already taken these steps or is intending to, we’re eternally grateful
yes, and bots have become more sophisticated, as you guys know
i occasionally talk to the eTools dev and he says he spends the majority of his time battling bots and i suppose the problem is only getting worse with “AI”
Q: curious, what is the ratio of bots that do and don’t process JS nowadays?
