Mojeek actually displays more results than Google

But can you see 10,600? Here’s the reality of what is truly visible at the moment when you browse the results’ pages of each search engine as of today:

Google: 304
Mojeek: 1,000
Duck Duck Go: 50
Brave: 19
Bing: 10
Yep: 10

Mojeek shows more in its search results than Google  by Jack Yan.

The point being, Google may tell you it has thousands of pages  but the amount it actually displays for a given search is much lower: 304.  Mojeek maxes out at 1000 by design.

Interesting article.  I didn’t know that.

Google and the Monotonous Web

Does it ever feel like the internet is getting worse? That’s been my impression for the last decade. The internet feels now like it consists of ten big sites, plus fifty auxiliary sites that come up whenever you search for something outside of the everyday ten. It feels like it’s harder to find amateur opinions on matters, except if you look on social media, where amateur opinions are shared, unsolicited, with much more enthusiasm than they deserve.

Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google.

Good article.  It’s long but there are a lot of moving parts that need to be explained.

My conclusion:  Google has a near monopoly on search.  It’s algorithm has to make judgement calls on which sites rank higher.  Google favors commercial sites and popularity.  This has a tendency to warp the web towards commerce and monotony.  Remember: Google’s ranking is only their opinion (based on perceived popularity.)

Because there is little real competition there are no checks on Google.  Moreover, Google is really an advertising company.  They are going to favor corporations that spend money with them and that ain’t the gal on Neocities.  Word.

SEO’s don’t care, they just want sites to rank so their clients can sell more product.  If Google is the only game in town then they game Google.

I think this all underlines the need for many major search engines.  These search engines should not try and clone Google’s SERPS but should find their own algorithms. Some will be better at long-tail, smaller sites, some commercial but with criteria different from Google.  (eg. Mojeek is fairly good at this right now.  Will it continue to be good at it as it grows ever bigger?)

 

Right Dao: Search Engine

Right Dao – is a search engine with it’s own index.  I think this is true but I cannot independently verify.

Right Dao has fairly good results for a small index.  This is a point in their favor.

Here in 2022 I often get an error message when I try and use them or go past the first page in the serps.

Mysterious:

Right Dao spokespersons seem very reluctant to reveal much about it.

In this Hacker News thread, IMHO answers often seem copy/paste and evade direct answers.  Sometimes for good reason but other times just elusive.

In this Reddit thread, answers seem elusive and almost verbatim copies of the answers given in the Hacker News thread above.

It could be my imagination.  Still it seems like the RD spokesperson is under tight control.

The mystery deepens there was a thread on Webmasterworld which I can no longer find, asking if anyone had ever seen a crawler from Right Dao in their server logs.  Nobody could identify one and these are SEO’s trained to do this.  So RD’s crawler must be pretending to be something else or …

Index size?

In mid 2022 my guess is it is maybe around 1 billion pages.  Smaller than Gigablast.  Much smaller than Mojeek.

 

Mojeek: Search Engine

Mojeek.com is a general web search engine.

What makes it significant?

  1. Privacy. No tracking.
  2. Has it’s own crawler and only uses it’s own index.  It does not use Bing or Google at all.
  3. It has the 4th largest self crawled English index of the Web after Google, Bing and Yandex.
  4. It is located in the UK, in the democratic West which has rule of law.
  5. It has it’s own algorithm and does not try to reverse engineer Google’s ranking results. (eg. Brave Search)

Because Yandex is Russian, for all practical purposes Mojeek is really the 3rd largest English Lang. search engine in terms of index size.