Jack Yan (甄爵恩)This is not the usual search engine I use, so for those more familiar with it, how many of these do you have to do to use #Google? I am up to 20. We don’t have to use this search engine, we do have choices.
Gave up after 24, back to @Mojeek, which just works.
Sozan@GRA3432 I like @Mojeek, probably the only one that offers real privacy, and it’s good enough for me 80 per cent of the time. You can set up links to other search engines to appear at the bottom of the page (including Qwant) if it doesn’t give you what you want, like how Duck Duck Go used to link to Google.
klu9@klu9 @GRA3432 That is annoying—guess I search for things that don't get those results. One plus is that you can send feedback to @Mojeek, who actually reply to you. Back in 2022 their result ordering left a bit to be desired, and for a lot of things they've improved through feedback. One issue is the small user base, so the algorithms have less of a chance to understand what is and isn't appropriate, an advantage that Google and Bing have.
@klu9 @GRA3432 @Mojeek I don't what the dodgy site is but the results look OK at a glance:
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=population+of+ancient+Rome
Interesting about the absence of Wikipedia, though for me that's often not that useful when it comes to cars, so I don't mind. I find it comes up on a lot of my searches.
Found my original post at !buyeuropean@feddit.uk
https://lemmy.ca/post/41307273
Search term was a bit different, trying that exact search now in Mojeek no longer gives that far right result. Which is nice :)
(Also I said Sad / Sick Puppies, should have said Rabid Puppies.)
Mojeek: not US but gives far right results? - Lemmy.ca
Over the last couple of days, a few posts on Lemmy led me to read more about: - Alternatives to (US-based) Wikipedia (triggered by a few comments in this /c) - Gamergate [https://lemmy.ca/post/41178651] & Rabid Puppies [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabid_Puppies] Thus I found out about Infogalactic (I won’t link to it); it’s a fork of Wikipedia created by a far-right white supremacist mysogynist “Vox Day” (a sci fi author and publisher who tried to rig the Hugo Awards to show his disdain for non-white, non-male authors) so as to have an encyclopaedia free of “the left-wing thought police who administer [Wikipedia]”. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day] Trying out Mojeek today, I did a search (population of Rome through history [https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=population+of+Rome+through+history]) and an Infogalactic page (History of Rome) was the 6th result. Not only was a far right website I had never seen before in the 8 years of its existence one of the top results, but the Wikipedia page it forked is nowhere to be found. 1. Is this common with Mojeek? 2. Are there ways to adjust its settings so as to not return far right search results? 3. And should we just stop recommending Mojeek as an alternative to US search engines as long as it does return far right search results to ordinary search queries?
@klu9 @GRA3432 Thank you, that was an interesting read. Gosh, this was only earlier this year. I'm hoping things are being corrected as more users adopt it. I did use to get the feeling that, despite @Mojeek basing the code on the ideas presented in Brin and Page's thesis, the presence of multiple keywords could fool it or prompt it to push the page up in the ranking. I just tried a few searches for Lucire and they are way more relevant now compared with the years before 2025.
@klu9 @GRA3432 Startpage is one of my back-ups listed at the bottom of @Mojeek search pages, also Ecosia. (I know they source from Big Search but I’d rather go through them than directly to Google or Bing.) For some reason I didn’t warm to Qwant—the logo change didn’t appeal to me and at the time they were mostly Bing, which was having massive trouble.