[skinkestek]

As has been said by someone before:

There's a billion dollar niche waiting for the right company:

- make a search engine that works

- show text ads clearly distinguishable from results

- play nice, and maybe even use use a cool slogan like "we're not evil" or something (it used to be someone else's but it seems they don't use it anymore ;-)

[ColinHayhurst]

Self-disclosure: Mojeek CEO. On your points:

- Our search engine works and has been doing so for >15 years. Our search quality needs improving but does so gradually. And it's independent; our own crawler, index and infrastructure

- We just introduced non-tracking search ads: https://www.mojeek.com/support/ads/

- We use "No Tracking , Just Search" and "Search without Surveillance"

We've been building for 15 years; here's our founder story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26502140

[eitland]

Wohoo! Just tested, what a refreshing change!

- simple and clean

- gives me exact results, i.e. empty set when I search for something deliberately misspelled or non-existent

That said it seems to struggle with hyphens, see the two last queries below.

Here are my test queries:

- https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=byggrybsgr%C3%B8t (misspelled, sent it anyway). Result: empty set, which is correct

- https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=byggrynsgr%C3%B8t (local porridge) Result: plenty of relevant looking results

- https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=elefantfelle (Norwegian for elephant trap) Result: empty set. (But DDG can find some pages.)

- https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=Honningsv%C3%A5g+ (town in Northern Norway). Result: interesting, but relevant. Nice card at the top with relevant information from Wikipedia

- https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=react+hooks Result: relevant results, two in a language that I rarely read (German) or cannot read (French?)

- https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=%22mat-table%22 Result: not a single relevant result on the front page (!)

- https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=mat-table Result: not a single relevant result on the front page

[ColinHayhurst]

Thanks for very useful feedback; always good to have. We'll look at those.

[jrochkind1]

Here's the first test search I did. "github ruby hanami" looking for the hanami github repo. Seems like a relatively simple query.

On Google, it's the first result. https://www.google.com/search?q=github+ruby+hanami

On mojeek, it's not even on the first page. https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=github+ruby+hanami

It's possible that at this point I (and others) have trained ourselves to know/do the kind of queries that work on Google, without even realizing it, which would be another thing making it hard to switch. Although in this case... I'm actually a bit surprised mojeek doesn't manage it. Just `github hanami` doesn't get it either. Is it just not matching on sitename at all?

[ricardo81]

Hello, mojeek dev here. Cheers for the feedback, appreciated.

In this case we simply don't have the page in our index, though we do have others mentioning hanami. Our bot is permitted to crawl github.com and has a good number of pages in from that host, we'll evaluate whether we can increase crawling for github and similar large sites and hopefully before long that page will enter the index.

[jrochkind1]

Ah, good to know.

As a developer one of the main things I'm searching for is code.

Unfortunately (for competitors) I can pretty much count on Google having everything I ever want in the index.

Not having the thing I'm looking for in the index is another wrinkle on top of relevancy.

[cjg]

I had a similar experience searching for "rust hashmap" - expecting to get some links to the standard docs.

[buzer]

I tried some development-related queries that I have recently done in Google.

Queries related to Go seem to mainly work only if using Go and not if using Golang (unless "go" + term is popular outside of Go as well). Usually people use Golang in search (to avoid confusion with the verb & game), but pages generally refer to Go. "go package XXXX" seems to work better in many cases.

With a bit of lesser known technologies, it was hard to find a query that would get me to the actual site. e.g. Python SDK for OCI. Lots of links to examples with various queries (python oci, python oci sdk, python oci api), but not really any direct link to GitHub or the official documentation.

[ricardo81]

Hello, mojeek dev here, thanks for the feedback it is always appreciated.

I think there's two ideas that come up from your feedback, one is index size. Our index is small but growing. A larger index increases the chance of having pages that satisfy your query.

The other aspect is boolean search versus something more akin to the vector space model. We've found a lot of people that are dissatisfied with Bing/Google searches tend to be unhappy that the search they actually enter is somehow modified to include what the search engine believes are relevant synonyms. In some cases, those synonyms may help in producing a better result when use of language is split between two terms used interchangeably, like go and golang. It's something we're looking into. We do value searches being based on what is actually searched for but also accept there are cases where assuming synonyms may be advantageous to the end results.

[kiwidrew]

If you do this, it'd be great to have a way to select the 'mode' of search (exact query vs 'smart' terms). I'm not sure what the user interface ought to be, but "literally" "anything" "would" "be" "better" than the contortions you have to go through to force search engines to search for the terms you've actually provided.

Great job so far, by the way, keep up the good work!

[passerby1]

Do I understand correct that duckduckgo is there already?

[skinkestek]

That's what I use as default.

But IMO it is a far cry from 2007 Google and only holds a candle because Google has nerfed itself.

And sadly, much of it isn't because they don't have resources for AI or even larger index but because of the same QA issues that Google has struggled with:

- including results that doesn't contain my search terms / too much fuzzing

- ignoring double quotes

Both probably in order to please the mythical ordinary/average user I guess.

Guess what: techies got me to change to startup Google and I guess we will get people to change to another search engine as soon as one is ready.

In the meantime I use DDG. The difference is mostly negligible now and when it isn't it is 20 times faster (I don't think this is hyperbole) to mash in a !g at the end of my DDG search than the other way around.

FTR: same goes for browsers. For me Firefox has always been best, but they have nerfed themselves and keep ignoring us techies to such a degree that I will - if necessary - pay monthly to get a safe, supported version of the same with my old extensions working, but not to Mozilla Foundation, only to the Corporation (the ones who create the browser) or someone else.

[ErrrNoMate]

It's not a search engine, it's just something built on top of Bing. We need something independent to cut through this, it can't have these ties.

[lopis]

Do you realize how expensive and hard it is to build a search engine from scratch? It's not a coincidence that only state-size corporations have been able to keep a high quality web index going. Cliqz tried and struggled hard, until they decided to shut down. It's not a "market ripe for disruption". It's maybe the market with the highest barrier of entry in tech.

[Satam]

Independence on its own, would not be a competitive advantage. In reality, for the most part, people do not care enough about minor privacy violations. The outrage you see online rarely bleeds into the average user's day-to-day decisions.

I wonder how the next disruptive innovation is going to look in the search engine market?

[fauigerzigerk]

>I wonder how the next disruptive innovation is going to look in the search engine market?

I think the search engine market will always be very closely linked to content distribution platforms. If the decentralised web continues to degenerate into an oligopoly of walled gardens then there will be no search engine market in the current sense. We will just use the search function provided by each platform.

I believe the question we have to ask is what the next disruptive content distribution platform is going to look like and whether that disruption can be anything more than yet another oligopolist stealing some share from the encumbents before getting bought by one of them (or not).