Big Data is Watching You
Posted: 21 January 2021
There is no one book more referenced when it comes to our high-technology surveillance reality than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Eric Arthur Blair (Orwell being his pen name) died on the 21st of January 1950. And so on January 1st, with more than 70 years since his passing, all of his works lost their copyrighted status in the UK and European Union. His most famous book, along with his many brilliant works, are now in the public domain. To celebrate this fact, and to explore this deep and enduring relationship between writings on both state and private company surveillance, we thought it would be good to pose the question: what did Orwell get right?
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About Mojeek: Search Engines and Our Technology Stack
Posted: 22 December 2020
We frequently get questions, through social networks or our support inbox, about Mojeek's tech stack and the work that goes into providing the world with a true alternative in search. To spread the answers to some of these questions further than the walled garden of our email inbox, or the social graphs of Twitter, Mastodon, and Reddit, we thought it would be a good idea to publish some of them on our blog.
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About Mojeek: Business Model, Surveillance, and Privacy
Posted: 08 December 2020
We frequently get questions, through social networks or our support inbox, about Mojeek's business model and the data involved in providing the world with a true alternative in search. To spread the answers to some of these questions further than the walled garden of our email inbox, or the social graphs of Twitter or Reddit, we thought it would be a good idea to publish some of them here...
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Popping Filter Bubbles in Firefox
Posted: 03 December 2020
In a previous article, we took a simple, non-partisan query, and tried it out on some search and a metasearch engines: "How to Register to Vote in the United States." What we found was that the choice of search provider was going to wildly change the information sources offered to you. It demonstrates that using one or more search engines is a very simple way of increasing your ability to step outside of algorithmic bubbles when looking for information. Let’s check out how we can do this in Firefox.
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Black Box Friday
Posted: 25 November 2020
Since the early 1950s, the first Friday after Thanksgiving has been the designated big shopping day for a lot of individuals across the US (and this has spread to a lot of other countries). With a great deal of physical stores across the world not being able to provide normal service this year, it looks like entities like Amazon will be able to cash in from the pandemic's effects even more than they already have.
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About Mojeek: Objectives, Company, and Team
Posted: 23 November 2020
We frequently get questions, through social networks or our support inbox, about Mojeek's purpose and the people who work hard to provide the world with a true alternative in search. To spread the answers to some of these questions further than the walled garden of our email inbox, or the social graphs of Twitter or Reddit, we thought it would be a good idea to publish some of them here...
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Five Reasons to Use Mojeek
Posted: 19 November 2020
Mojeek is the only privacy-oriented web search engine in the world. This might surprise many of you. You might be saying “What about DuckDuckGo or Startpage?” Well, technically speaking these aren’t search engines at all, they are metasearch engines as they get their organic results from another mainstream engine (most of them from Bing and a small number from Google). English-speaking search engines with their own index such as Google, Bing, and Yandex are renowned for tracking you as you use their search engine, and often past that point wherever they can.
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Good bot, bad bot. How search indexing works.
Posted: 11 November 2020
In 1993, Charlie Stross was feeling bored and fractious in his job at SCO UNIX. He decided to learn Perl and work on a Web spider since his company was developing HTML. Back then the resources that existed to help people learn to build these things were very much in their early stages, but Charlie muddled through. After coding up something that looked like it would work, he began testing it, initially putting it to work crawling one of the websites that he'd used in order to learn how to build his spider. Unfortunately, the website in question was owned by a company that did not have the kind of infrastructure to handle the incoming traffic from this newly-built tool. Charlie overloaded them with traffic, much in the way that a Direct Denial of Service attack would today.
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