Mojeek Updates, November 2022
Recently we have been busy improving the search engine, as well as adding in some extra functionality. Here's a rundown of what is changed and/or new:
Languages
A good amount of changes have involved giving more control to you over language settings, as well as using language to affect results.
- Your own set or detected language now affects what you see, boosting things which are in the same language. This has been added due to some feedback on seeing different-language results which weren't useful for some people, and is the culmination of a long-running task to detect this, re-index pages, and use language within the ranking.
- Related to this, our Set the preferred language for search results option now comprises every language that it is possible to search Mojeek in - all the way from Aragonese to Zulu.
- We've added in both Polish and Portuguese to our indexable languages. Please be patient with these as it will take some time to build up a substantial index in either language; this being said feel free to check this out by searching in either.
Gravity
Gravity refers to a core authority signal used in rankings for Mojeek, the equivalent in Google is called PageRank. Re-running gravity is a process which allows us to keep the results you see up-to-date with the changes that have happened in terms of things such as links. We recently undertook a big project to update Gravity scores and we've made it so that this will now happen both more easily and frequently.
Relevancy
Since the introduction of the Mojeek Eval page, we have rolled out three changes to the ranking algorithm. These have targetted specific issues and have improved overall relevancy. One algorithm test was not deployed due to its poorer evaluation.
Crawling
Improving what we crawl, whether that is new pages or refreshing already-indexed pages, is a never-ending process. Recently we have made a number of larger changes to improve this considerably, tweaking overall indexing speed, as well as the rate at which we refresh pages and remove those which are obsolete. This was mostly achieved through adjusting the crawl priority queues and better handling of crawl error codes and rates.
Wikipedia
The Wikipedia infobox, which you can turn off in Preferences if you want, has been added to and improved.
- Polish and Portuguese Wikipedia has been added into Mojeek, to complement the addition of these two languages more broadly.
- Image display in the infobox has been improved, with some languages missing an image before this change.
- A few errors that were coming up before with the display of the Wikipedia infobox have been fixed.
FireOS
We had a bug raised by a Mojeek user with the Amazon Fire Tablet, this was causing problems with using Mojeek on it. This fix has now been deployed and so if you're an Amazon FireOS user, you should now be able to search the web from your device.
If you have a suggestion for something we can change, remember that we have the Mojeek Community, Contact Page, Evaluation Page, and the Submit Feedback button which sits on search engine results pages. Your feedback is both massively valued and useful when it comes to making Mojeek better.
