actually awesome and fast search engine (depending on which instance you use) with no trashy AI and ADs results also great for privacy, if you don't know which instance to use go to https://searx.space/ and choose an instance closest to you
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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For all their talk of doing things different with their own index and rankings. Mojeek is following exactly what Google did. It's still an ad based business model that makes users into products to be sold to advertisers. They're good now, while still trying to build market share. But once their investors get hungry, the enshitification will commence.
we make money mainly from our api, our investors are patient private capital and we don't take vc, appreciate your point but these are fundamentally different situations, our ads (when they run) will also be contextual so more of a ddg situation than a "makes users into products to be sold to advertisers"
fair enough if it's not for you though
I don't know if the comparison is inaccurate.
You make money from advertising to your users ("ddg situation" notwithstanding), are beholden to your investors (private status notwithstanding) and need to see more users to increase revenue. The person above you is saying that this model is what will drive you to eventually be as bad as Google. Do you understand?
We make money from our API, what they're referencing is a beta ads programme which was running
API index access is an important difference.
If it was only that, without public facing ad driven search, I'd be more impressed.
Maybe if you removed the adds, and severely rate limited your own public facing search, so it's more of a demo than an actual service. This would force you to solely make money off the API access, without directly competing against those customers.
That would be an honest buisness model. One that doesn't turn users into eyeballs for advertising. Which seems to me, to be the most insidious problem of the modern internet.
Agree to disagree here, but I'll refer to Cory Doctorow for a contextual vs behavioral/tracking ads comparison, one which is very good: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads (applied to the media, but the general thread is relevant)
Do you have topics that are censored? I searched for my reddit post "what I've learnt from the mantis aliens", and it does not show up in your results. Neither at google's. But it does on other search engines. The ufo/alien stuff are censored in most search engines, while there isn't a reason to be. That is how I judge search engines. And Mojeek doesn't give me the results I asked for.
Reddit doesn't allow us to crawl: https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt
Is that legally binding? What happens of they catch you, ban your IPs then you’re in the same situation as now. Literally no reason to not do it IMO.
IP already hits a wall, also better to not get a reputation as a bad bot, it's taken a while to get known for being friendly and respecting rules, to us you should follow robots
I seem to recall creative ways to index things without robots, e.g. browser addon that users opt into to send pages and such, essentially crowdsourcing the indexing. Anyways good to see you’re taking the high road!
our preference is always to find out why the block is happening and try to convince people it should be otherwise; widespread abuse of robots.txt does no-one any good, having been crawling and indexing for so long it's a standard that we understand and are quite fond of
we can see some of the perils and pitfalls of it too, but web builders need to be given some tools and assurances that those tools will work for them
That makes sense. One thing I’ve noticed with Mojeek search results compared to Google is that I do not encounter the “old web” any more on Mojeek than on Google. Are you not crawling/indexing web 1.0 blogs and sites at all?
probably a sample size issue, we crawl and index everything we are able to; have seen many of this kind of site in the past, and finding them is something that other people have said they enjoy about mojeek