British service Mojeek is a new search engine that is essentially the polar opposite of Google; it collects no user data whatsoever, and its algorithm is made specifically to avoid prioritizing results by anything besides relevance, including popularity. The service also does not have any advertisements or other surface monetization features. This means that users get completely unbiased results from all over the web, selected from the two billion pages that Mojeek has crawled completely on its own since it began as a personal project in 2009. The only aspect of Mojeek that’s not entirely without a footprint is site settings; if you choose to edit Mojeek’s settings, you’ll get a cookie with your settings information on your computer, and Mojeek will pull that cookie. It does not include any personally identifiable information, or anything else for that matter, besides your settings.
Mojeek started up as a personal project for creator Marc Smith back in 2009 and was run from his bedroom for quite some time. The project scaled up over time, and now resides in the UK’s most eco-friendly data center, hosted by a company called Custodian. Mojeek also has an emotional search engine which allows users to ask the search tool to surface pages based on a given emotional connotation, such as “happy,” “sad,” “funny,” or “angry.” This is, of course, in conjunction to any given search terms. As a bonus, users in the UK can also shop on Mojeek thanks to Amazon integration. Wider shopping support and more features are coming in the near future.
Mojeek is among the small but growing number of search engines that don’t collect any user data and are focused on privacy and security. It has a leg up on the likes of DuckDuckGo, however, because of its leaner, greener setup and emphasis on refusing to allow its algorithm to become biased. The emotional search engine is also a fairly unique feature, though it should come as no surprise that it doesn’t always work as intended. Mojeek does not have a mobile app for Android or iOS at the moment but will work through any mobile or desktop browser. It is worth noting that Mojeek cannot keep your browser and your machine from logging your history of its use, even if it doesn’t log any activity itself.