Search Choices Enable Freedom to Seek
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” in Mojeek and allow you to quickly and conveniently view results from 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:
| Search | Type of Search | Data Handling |
|---|---|---|
| Bing | Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | Collects extensive data |
| Brave | Correlated Index/Rank [3] | No tracking |
| DuckDuckGo | Service | Microsoft syndication partner |
| Ecosia | Service | Microsoft syndication partner |
| Gigablast | Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | No tracking |
| Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | Collects extensive data | |
| Mojeek | Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | No tracking |
| Startpage | Service | Google syndication partner |
| Yandex | Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | Collects 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:
- https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/
- https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/search.html
- 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.
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.
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 Search Choices selections are fully controllable by you in the Mojeek Appearance settings as shown below.
