What is Mojeek?
Mojeek (www.mojeek.com) is a free search engine website for searching the web with its own index that attempts to be an alternative for mainstream search engines.
Notable Features
Web search: Mojeek can search the web for websites and webpages.
AI-powered summary: it seems Mojeek added AI-powered summaries recently, in March 20241, and this should be available through the "Summary" tab or a summarize link, but no matter what I searched for I got the message "Sorry, we encountered an issue generating a summary for this search. Please try again later," so I can't review how this works at this time.
Own community forums: Mojeek hosts its own Discourse-based community forum where users can give feedback for the search engine. It's available at community.mojeek.com.
Ads: Mojeek apparently sells ad-space to make money, which means it's probably not going to disappear tomorrow due to lack of funding to keep the servers running. If you see something free on the Internet without ads in it, it's just harder to believe it will stick around without knowing how it's getting funded, and I've seen some search engines that don't have any ads at all, so they look like tiny one-person projects that will quickly die if they ever get any real traffic, which means you can't really use them, because if you used them, they'd just die faster. Which brings me to a problem: perhaps because of my location, I haven't seen a single ad on Mojeek. And I'm not alone: apparently, they just... turned off the ads?2 What? Well, I hope the ads come back so I don't have to worry about the longevity of the alternative search engine.
Missing Features
Some features that Mojeek lacks compared to other search engines:
Rich results: Mojeek's results appear to be always in pure text, and do not include images, thumbnails, favicons, or "card" style results for recipes and the kind..
Image search: Mojeek doesn't provide web image search. It does have an image search page, but the results do not come form its own index of the web. Instead, they're provided by either Pixabay or Openverse, the former by default. Pixabay and Openverse are image-related websites where creators can upload their own images that they own the copyright of. They're similar to Flickr. This means the image results on Mojeek don't come from images on random webpages, they just come from what was uploaded on Pixabay or on Openverse.
Observations
"403 - Forbidden. Sorry your network appears to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time." After trying Mojeek for a couple of days, I've run into this message several times. Essentially, this happens when the servers detect unusual queries that don't appear to come from a human being, and, to protect the website from wasting their resources serving a bot, they just don't serve anything at all. I'm not sure 403 is the right HTTP error code for this, 429 or 400 are likely more appropriate. In any case, this is a sensible policy, except that I hit the threshold to be considered a bot way too fast! It seems that just using search operators like double quotes for exact phrase search is enough to make Mojeek think I'm a bot. Another problem is trying to search for extremely long phrases. Sometimes I see a quote on the Internet, so I just selected the whole text and right click to search for the whole text in a search engine. Other search engines can handle this somehow, but Mojeek's systems seem to consider this abusive.
Personally, I don't think I can use Mojeek as my default search engine. I'm a power user and a developer—I'm used to Googling everything, specially using Google to search for documentation of software I'm making use of. For me, it's very important the first result for random words is the official documentation of the most recent version of a given piece of software, which, admittedly, is kind of a difficult demand to attend to. In this use case, Google remains better than everything else on the market. But there are people out there that don't search for what I search. It could be that for you, Mojeek is better than Google, so it might be worth trying it out, just to see if it better suits your needs.
References
- https://community.mojeek.com/t/testing-mojeek-summary/982 (accessed 2024-04-29) ↩︎
- https://community.mojeek.com/t/help-getting-mojeek-added-to-adguards-list-of-allowed-search-engine-ads/746 (accessed 2024-04-29) ↩︎
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