Search Functionality With a Difference on Mojeek
Settings allow you to tailor your search experience to your own personal needs. In our eyes, the more customisation you get in how you search, the better. Similarly, if a search engine uses personalisation without you having control over this process, that’s a bad thing. Personal autonomy should come first when it comes to search. Here are a few of the ways we provide that on Mojeek, that you will not find elsewhere...
Choose with News
For some queries on other search engines, news results can crowd out the non-news organic results, forming a large block under the search box. In Mojeek there are three (if relevant stories exist) nested on the right-hand side of the page, just under where the Infobox sits if both appear for a query. This being said, you can choose to have no news results at all, fewer, or more (up to 10).
We elected not to have News results sit above organic search results, and there is also always the option of turning them off if you’d prefer not to see them. We understand it’s good to keep up with current events, but not to have them forced upon you.
Customise display of results
We’ve covered some of these options in more detail before, but in your Mojeek Preferences you can:
- amend the number of results per page;
- switch on or off site clustering, changing how many individual results can appear for a single host;
- add in the dates that our index says a page was last crawled or has registered that it was last modified;
- change the length of titles and snippets (more on that below); and
- have the document size of a page appear in the results.
These are things you don't see frequently elsewhere.
Dig deeper
As we’ve covered before, in a piece entitled Are Search Engines Deleting the Web?, other search engines reduce the quantity of search results you’re able to access, even when the reported number of matches is substantial. Numbers found elsewhere are by and large estimates, whereas on Mojeek it is an exact number.
With us you can always get to 1,000 results where relevant matches exist. On top of this, Mojeek clusters results from the same host, so if there are 100 results from reddit.com they will be compacted into one on the page, creating more variety. Underneath this clustered result is a see more... link, which triggers a site: search of that host, and takes you to another possible 1,000 results.
Vary title and snippet lengths
On Mojeek you have the option to deviate from the default title and snippet lengths, which are 68 and 160 characters respectively. This allows you to just have the titles (snippet length 0), replace titles with URLs (title length 0), max out the snippets (snippet length 511), or do any manner of other tweaks to make the results look just how you like them.
Choose where to search
Mojeek Focus is a tool that allows you to search the web you want, by selecting a subset of websites to search across. You can go straight to your Dashboard and start creating, or try out some of the templates for a showcase of what Focus can do.
Go somewhere else next
Search Choices allow you to quickly repeat a search on a range of different web search providers, something which is offered by other search and metasearch engines, but the way we have implemented this is a bit different. With Mojeek, you can control which Search Choices appear through your Mojeek Preferences, as well as deciding if you want these buttons to appear at the bottom of the page, in the search bar, or in both positions.
We respect the fact that a healthy informational diet is provided through many different sources and that not everyone wants to have exactly the same search setup. We make it as easy as possible to search on Mojeek your way, discovering some of the hidden gems that a true alternative can uncover. When you want to go back to the mainstream there are always the Search Choice buttons sat at the bottom of the page.
