Tag: Mojeek

Search Engines that Have Found this Site

This will be a running list.

Site created 4 August 2022.  Launched around 8 August 2022.  Very few inbound links.

As of 18 August 2022.  Search was for “cyberzettel”

Bing – Yes.  extensive crawling.  Already got first SE hit via DuckDuckGo which relies on Bing.  Still surprised.

Google – Yes.  Several pages.

Yandex – No.

Mojeek – No.

Gigablast – No.

Brave – No.

Right Dao – No.

Yep – Yes.  This really surprised me. Only one or two pages plus a couple of pages that link to or mention.

Alexandria – No.

 

Bonus Surprise –

Wiby.me – little Wiby.me did not have this site in their index because they don’t crawl the web.  But they found two pages in their index that actually mentioned the site.  So they do keep their index fresh.  Cool.

This isn’t a critique of the search engines listed, but since I have a new site it presents an opportunity to test how fast these search engines find and index.

Bookmark: A look at search engines with their own indexes by Seirdy.

 

The three dominant English search engines with their own indexesnote 1 are Google, Bing, and Yandex (GBY). Many alternatives to GBY exist, but almost none of them have their own results; instead, they just source their results from GBY.

With that in mind, I decided to test and catalog all the different indexing search engines I could find. I prioritized breadth over depth, and encourage readers to try the engines out themselves if they’d like more information.

This is one of the best examinations of search engines with their own indexes, which are quite rare.  Well worth the read.

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?)

 

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.