New Pathways with Expanded Search Choices
On February 9 2022 we released Search Choices, a piece of functionality which allows the people using Mojeek to search the web on other tools at the click of a button. As we said then:
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.
Changes in the search market, as well as inbound requests from users, have caused us to revisit this set of buttons. These included the disappearance of Gigablast, the entrance of Ahref’s Yep which is a crawler-based search engine, and the appearance of AI options such as You.com. By combining these with some metasearch engines that didn’t make the original shorter list we have our updated set:
And if you are looking for an informative table, like the last piece, here it is:
| 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 |
| Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | Collects extensive data | |
| Lilo | Service | Microsoft syndication partner |
| Metager | Service | Microsoft syndication partner |
| Mojeek | Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | No tracking |
| Qwant | Service | Microsoft syndication partner |
| Startpage | Service | Google syndication partner |
| Swisscows | Service | Microsoft syndication partner |
| Yandex | Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | Collects extensive data |
| Yep | Engine: Crawler/Index/Rank | No tracking |
| You | Service | 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
These Choice options can be turned off or on in your Mojeek Preferences. with those who would prefer not to have a cookie being able to save the Cookieless URL to preserve their setup.
This is not necessarily the final iteration of Search Choices, in fact we often have people ask for more buttons, and will revisit this list periodically to make sure it offers as much utility as possible to those using Mojeek to search the web.
