Independent and Unbiased Search Results
mojeek
30 August 2018
4 min
Mojeek is a crawler based search engine with its very own index of web pages, so we are not reliant on any other engine to produce our results. Our index is growing at an incredible rate, and as it grows the quality of results we return are improved. This means your experience using Mojeek also improves. Mojeek doesn't have an agenda, and neither does it support any particular view, whether that's in regard to politics or if blue is a nicer colour than green. And that's the way we believe search engines should be. Our task is to provide you with relevant search results, not to force a point of view on you, or hide ones we don't agree with.
Search engine algorithms are often considered to be the most trusted source of finding information on the Web. However, a lot of search engines fail to provide their users with unbiased results. And many use algorithms to willingly alter them altogether. Sometimes they do this in the name of personalisation, or these days "fake news", running the risk of going against the fundamentals of being unbiased.
As mentioned in our article about GDPR, and the importance of privacy, these search engines use trackers to snatch snippets of personal information which make up your identity. Not only is this unethical (well we think so), in regards to search results it leads to the creation of a filter bubble. Because some search engines think they know what's best for you, these filter bubbles are brought about by intricate algorithms which select and rank what you should see, or at least, what they think you should see based on your previous search history or sites you have visited. Because the filter bubble is invisible, it's impossible to figure out the editorial basis on what gets censored and what doesn't. Eric Schmidt said, people "want Google to tell them what they should be doing next". Maybe that's so, but that's not what we want to do, so instead Mojeek provides an alternative that does the exact opposite.
So why do we still need another search engine when there are other options, for example, DuckDuckGo and Startpage? Although we very much respect these alternative engines (usually due to our overlapping ethos), they still rely upon a mainstream engine to provide them with their organic search results, which in turn come complete with the bias already present within those results or engine. When you use Mojeek you don't have to worry about first or second hand bias, our index has been created from the ground up, and our results are ranked according to our own algorithms and no-one else's. Our algorithm ranks pages on what it thinks is the most relevant to the keywords you searched for, it doesn't take into account what you've previously searched for, the sites you've visited, or even what we ourselves consider to be true or false. But even if we wanted to know who you were and alter your results accordingly, we can't, as we do not record or keep that information on the people who use Mojeek.
mojeek
30 August 2018
4 min
