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Search Choices Enable Freedom to Seek

colin

09 February 2022

5 min

a railway track going into a smartphone

At Mojeek we believe informational diversity is vital to a healthy society and economy. When most search results are dominated by one company, we are led down pathways determined by engineering and algorithmic decisions made by just a few people. We think people should have more easily-accessible choices. Varied viewpoints are good in search, as they are in debate.

If you search with Mojeek, perhaps you also use another private search service to see alternative results, and vice-versa. Why be constrained by the one choice selectable in your browser? What if you could set-up Mojeek, and then be able to switch to DuckDuckGo or Google to see alternative results with one click. For this reason we have decided to implement “Search Choices”, allowing you to quickly and conveniently repeat searches you've done on Mojeek on other providers. The idea was partly inspired by the search box in Firefox which also enables one click multiple search selection, as we explained in a previous post “Multiple Choice in Search”.

Supported Search Choices

The following Search Choices are supported:

SearchType of SearchData Handling
BingEngine: Crawler/Index/RankCollects extensive data
BraveCorrelated Index/Rank [3]No tracking
DuckDuckGoServiceMicrosoft syndication partner
EcosiaServiceMicrosoft syndication partner
GigablastEngine: Crawler/Index/RankNo tracking
GoogleEngine: Crawler/Index/RankCollects extensive data
MojeekEngine: Crawler/Index/RankNo tracking
StartpageServiceGoogle syndication partner
YandexEngine: Crawler/Index/RankCollects extensive data

Search Types marked as "Service" above (sometimes referred to as search proxies) predominantly use the search engines, and ads, of Microsoft or Google, as indicated. Some claim to do some indexing and/or use APIs of other information providers (eg StackOverflow). If you are interested reviews of the business practices, privacy policies and status of search engines and services, you should find these independent articles informative:

  1. https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/
  2. https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/search.html
  3. https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html including comments on the indexing method used by Brave https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html

How to use Search Choices

To use Search Choices, you conduct a search on Mojeek and then select from the Search Choice buttons at the bottom of the search results page.

search buttons at the bottom of the results page

Whether the Buttons are shown there can be controlled by you in the Mojeek Appearance settings. Here you can also turn on the Search Choice Bar.

you can choose which buttons appear in the Search Choice Bar

With the Search Choice Bar selected, Search Choices will appear below the search box when you start typing. When you have finished typing your search query you can select your Choice by selecting the logo/button you prefer.

the Mojeek search choice bar

The Search Choices selections are fully controllable by you in the Mojeek Appearance settings as shown below.

Search Choices are fully controllable by you

colin

09 February 2022

5 min

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