Thoughts: Mojeek.com Indie Privacy Search Engine

Last night I took some time to play around with the Mojeek.com search engine.  It’s UK based, small compared to the Big Boys, and respects your privacy.

What makes Mojeek different from other privacy search engines is tat it uses it’s own index.  Yes, they actually crawl the Web with their own spider and algorithm rather than replying on Google or Bing for the backbone of their results.  Unique is an over used word but it applies here and that deserves some respect.

Looking at the search results:

  1. Results were relevant to the keywords I was searching for.  No oddball pages totally off topic. Good.
  2. The search results looked so different from Bing or Google’s first three pages. Everybody tries to clone Google’s search results. Mojeek is not doing that. Part of this is because they have a smaller index and they results will improve when they get larger.  What I realized was the results I was getting looked more like page 4+ results on Google.  This is not a bad thing.  I found a good looking blog directory on Mojeek results that is buried on page 5+ on the other search engines.  This can be handy for deep research.
  3. Nice integration of Wikipedia.
  4. Good News page and search.  I might start using this.
  5. They are actively spidering. Ramblinggit is only about a month old and they have one or two of my posts indexed.
Mojeek is not going to be your daily driver, but it is good for churning up good sites that don’t make it to the top in the Big Engines.  This makes it worth consulting when you want something a little different.  And privacy is a plus.

Edit Added:

Mojeek.co.uk is the UK version of Mojeek.  The UK Mojeek may have a larger index than the .com, which makes sense for a UK based engine.

 

NEW: You can now read my full review of Mojeek.

Brad Enslen @bradenslen

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