Mojeek Surpasses 5B Pages | Hacker News Reader

Mojeek Surpasses 5B Pages

blog.mojeek.com

"No Tracking. Just Search..." is cool but it's been tried before, see DuckDuckGo.

It would be nice to have "No Filters. Just Search..." as well.

DuckDuckGo did implement filters which is big part of the problem. Mojeek is also independent when DuckDuckGo is just cover on mostly Bing.

Mojeek has not tracked users from the start in 2004, having made a public commitment to that in 2006, and before DuckDuckGo started.

As the OP (thank you) points out Mojeek is entirely independent with it's own crawler, index and ranking. It's a search engine, not a search proxy/service, so does not depend on the policies of Microsoft, Yandex or Google for that matter.

I've just seen your article[1] about business model. Do you think ads will be more sustainable than a subscription-based model? Since a lot of people that will use your search engine know how a computer works (i.e., they know something other than Google), it's fair to assume most of them will have an ad-blocker. Furthermore, ads are counter-productive for a service where you want to have the best result as fast as possible; people won't be looking at ads, or ads will be so intrusive the service will decline in quality (see Google). Did you do some research since the article?

From what I've heard, the UK is pretty big on surveillance. How do the laws impact the "non-tracking" part of the service?

[1]: https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/12/frequently-asked-questions-a...

We made product and business progress since that article. Currently we make more revenue from our API than Ads. Wehave other revenue streams in place and planned. Can't diagree with your points at all. We see Ads as part of the picture; contextual ads only of course. We stand totally against surveillance based Ads [0].

No impact of UK laws, at least yet. That might change for us and every other search engine/service with UK users, but recent indications are encouraging on search, if not social media [1]. Our take on anonymity here [2].

[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/07/time-to-ban-surveillance-bas...

[1] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/08/online-safety-our-feedback-t...

[2] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/10/in-defence-of-online-anonymi...

(Founder of Neeva here) Colin -- huge congratulations on the 5B milestone. Crawling the web, building and serving a large index, and powering your own ranking is not for the faint of heart. Great job!

Thanks for being here Colin, that says a lot about your commitment to the product :)

I will take a look at your API as I'm currently doing my own thing using Common Crawl + some perl (yeah... perl) scripts, but that's quite expensive to maintain.

In their About page[0], they describe themselves as:

"...a search engine that does what's right, that values and respects your privacy, whilst providing its own unique and unbiased search results."

So they do claim to be unbiased, unlike DuckDuckGo.

[0]: https://www.mojeek.com/about/

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