About Mojeek; Objectives, Company, and Team
We frequently get questions, through social networks or our support inbox, about Mojeek's purpose and the people and work 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... (part 2 of these FAQs is available here, part 3 is available here and part 4 is available here.)
Objectives
What is Mojeek?
Mojeek is a search engine that displays unique and unbiased search results, whilst also respecting the privacy of those who use it.
How did Mojeek start?
Mojeek started in the bedroom of our Founder, Marc Smith in 2004. Marc, who had been working building websites and shareware games, created the search engine as a personal project. There was never any intention of hosting Mojeek publicly, but Marc was encouraged by friends and professional contacts to open it up to the general public. In 2009 Mojeek was handed its first ever investment; it was then that it became more than a personal project.
What are the objectives of the company?
To create, maintain, and grow an independent, sustainable business based on a true search engine which does not track you.
Company
Where is Mojeek based?
Mojeek is a UK-based limited liability company. Our employees all work remotely across the UK and overseas.
Are you a remote company?
Mojeek is and always has been a remote company.
Where are the Mojeek servers based?
Our servers are based in and run from Custodian Data Centre in Maidstone, Kent. Custodian is the UK’s greenest data centre and provides its services to around 300 businesses, including Praiter Raines, Holiday Extras, Secure:Data, The KM Group, and (obviously) Mojeek.
How do you pronounce Mojeek?
It is pronounced ‘moh-jeek’ with a hard ‘j’. In many countries this is an unnatural sound, and so we encourage the use of ‘moh-yeek’ to those folks who find our name near unpronounceable.
Where did the name Mojeek come from?
When coming up with a name Marc, our founder, wanted something completely unique. Mojeek is simply a made up word based on the word ‘logic’ (logique → Mojeek) with no relation to anything else.
Team
Who funds Mojeek?
Mojeek has received investment over the years by individual private investors who are committed to the values and goals of Mojeek. Details about the people who have invested in Mojeek can be found on Companies House and in this blog post.
Who has a controlling interest in the company and majority voting rights?
Only our founder, Marc Smith, who is also our full-time technical lead.
Who are the developers of Mojeek?
Mojeek was initially developed by Marc Smith using the C coding language and without any pre-existing search or web-crawler technology. The current development team comprises four individuals alongside Marc, who have a wide range of experiences and backgrounds.
Who is the founder of Mojeek and what previous businesses has he been involved in?
Mojeek’s Founder, Marc Smith, both prior to and during the process of developing the search engine worked on shareware games and building websites. As you can see from Companies House, Marc has never had any appointments outside of Mojeek.
Who is your CEO and what previous businesses has he been involved in?
Colin Hayhurst, our CEO, has very significant commercial and technical experience internationally in startups, R&D, academia, and industry. Before Mojeek he has been the CTO, CEO, and CCO of startups in high-performance computing, web infrastructure, and machine learning. He co-founded his first startup in the 1980s and grew and bootstrapped that successfully until 2005. After that he worked as a coach, mentor, and investment-readiness advisor to over 100 start-ups. More recently he was co-founder of a Y Combinator summer 2012 company StackBlaze/GoScale and machine learning consultancy DataJavelin. Fun fact: Colin was once a world expert on space debris and worked with engineers in the EU/USA/Russia/Japan on the International Space Station design project.
What software tools do you use internally?
As a team that understands the importance of both privacy and Free and Open Source Software, we pride ourselves on working with a technology stack that reflects those values. We communicate using Zulip, Nextcloud Talk, and Jitsi, with our collaborative file editing and storage taking place on Nextcloud. Our email service is provided by Fastmail, with the team using various tools such as Thunderbird to view and send emails. The development team use self-hosted GitLab as a Git repository manager. You can read more about these tools in one of our previous blog posts.
Where can I apply for a job with Mojeek?
For a list of open vacancies, please see the Mojeek careers page. We will also announce job openings through our newsletter, which you can sign up for below.
