About Ranking on Mojeek
At Mojeek, we pride ourselves on being a search engine that provides relevant and accurate results to our users, from a position of neutrality. But what does it mean when a search engine claims that it is "unbiased"?
In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at how Mojeek differs from other search engines like Google and Bing, and why we believe our approach is better when it comes to offering users a portal to the wide range of diverse views and destinations available online.
Personalisation and Other Signals
One major difference between Mojeek and other search engines is that we do not use personalisation or click data as ranking signals; in fact, part of our philosophy is to not collect these data at all. This means that two users performing the same search query, at the same time and in the same country, will receive the same results, regardless of their browsing history or any kind of ‘clickstream’ data collected from others. We believe this approach helps to avoid influencing individuals, pops filter bubbles, and creates a more neutral search experience. Additionally, personalisation requires user tracking, which raises the ethical and privacy concerns that we’ve been talking about for years.
The use of personalisation and click-based ranking signals can create a "rich get richer" paradigm where high-ranked websites continue to receive more traffic and popularity. This will lead to a homogenisation of results and a lack of diverse perspectives. We do, however, think that it’s useful for people to be able to have location factor into the process of ranking. Location allows us to give matching country-level results a bit more of a boost, aiding in certain informational discovery processes such as finding goods and services without going across national borders.
Put succinctly, at Mojeek we believe in the principle of information neutrality. This means that all information provided by the service should be treated equally, regardless of the users’ attributes, their aggregate behaviours, or the financial or influential interests of the service provider. This principle has net benefits for the person seeking the information in the form of a multitude of perspectives on any issue. It also benefits the websites providing it, through us passing traffic to the pages that they’ve created to inform, educate, and convince.
Hyperlinks
Mojeek is similar to Google and Bing insofar as we use backlinks to determine the search-query-independent authority of a page (PageRank on Google, Gravity on Mojeek). This is then combined with relevant keyword matching, an element of semantic matching (matching the meaning, rather than just the exact words), and the user’s chosen settings - most notably location and language preferences.
This approach means that hyperlinks are still an important tool when it comes to determining high-authority websites whilst also allowing for more diverse and relevant results. Lower-authority websites can still be ranked highly if their content is relevant to the search query - through both keyword and semantic matching, as well as many of the other signals that we use.
On Manual Intervention
It's important to realise that (except in the case of illegal kinds of content, malware and spam, as detailed in our Content Policy) Mojeek does not do any manual intervention on specific sets of results or queries in our ranking algorithm. All results are determined by computers, rather than people, which helps to avoid some of the biases that may be present in human decision-making.
Changes like our 2024 Algorithm Update are made using large-scale trends that have been identified by us, using the feedback sent in by Mojeek users. All webpages are subject to the same ranking algorithm, an algorithm that is based upon objective factors rather than personal preferences about which sites should be put at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages. Our preference is always to find larger trends which are affecting the quality of search results on Mojeek and find ways to fix them together.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Mojeek's approach to search is designed to be neutral. By avoiding personalisation, popularity-based ranking signals, and manual intervention, we provide a more diverse and relevant search experience for our users. We believe that this approach is better for the health of the online information space, as it allows users to find a wide variety of different perspectives and then make up their own mind and decisions - in short Mojeek is about increasing your autonomy.
As we wrote in a blog post many years ago:
Mojeek doesn't have an agenda, and neither does it support any particular view, whether that's in regard to politics or if blue is a nicer colour than green. And that's the way we believe search engines should be. Our task is to provide you with relevant search results, not to force a point of view on you, or hide ones we don't agree with.
If you want to help feed into future iterations of the Mojeek algorithm, or a suggestion for something we can change, remember that we have both the Contact Page and Submit Feedback button - this sits on search engine results pages. Your feedback is invaluable when it comes to making Mojeek better.
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