Search Engine Prioritises User Choice and Freedom to Seek
FOR PUBLICATION ON OR AFTER 8am GMT on 08/02/2022
BRIGHTON, England, February 8, 2022. On June 26 2000, Google announced that it had an index that would enable internet users to search across more than 1-billion URLs, a significant milestone on their path towards becoming the dominant player in search. Companies that were competing with them at the time ceased operation or were sold on to other companies, subsequently withdrawing from the market: AltaVista was purchased by Yahoo! and does not crawl and index the web any longer. Other engines such as Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! now rely upon Google’s and Bing’s (Microsoft) indexes respectively, just like many other so-called search engines.
The number of actual indexes in 2022, repositories of information and links, is alarmingly small, with the English-language offering for search comprising Google, Bing, Yandex, Mojeek and Gigablast. Those who see access to the world’s information being gate-kept by a few companies as a problem have a further reason to worry; on top of the small number providing searchable indexes of results, the market is very uneven, with Google having a 92% market share in 2021. When you add to this the market share of those using Bing you get to 97%.
Pervasive defaults, vertical integrations, browsers, app stores, Android and partnerships have resulted in Google being deeply entrenched as the default search offering of the web, becoming the one source of information to rule us all has been their goal.
UK-based search engine, Mojeek, believes that informational diversity and more choice in search is vital. For this reason, they have decided to support “Search Choices” allowing users to quickly and conveniently view results from other providers, including Google or Bing for those how are not concerned about privacy and data-harvesting.
Released today, Search Choices allow those searching the web using Mojeek to swiftly query other search engines and services using a single click. This can be done both via the search box on their homepage, or at the bottom of their Search Engine Results Page. Supported options which are selectable by the user are Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo (Bing partner), Ecosia (Bing partner), Gigablast, Google, Startpage (Google partner) and Yandex.
Whilst Mojeek has an independent index of nearly 5-billion webpages, this move offers their users easy pathways to different options in search, providing different informational sources, ranking algorithms and levels of privacy protection.
Colin Hayhurst, Mojeek CEO said:
”It’s time to inject life back into search and web navigation. Whilst we wait for regulators to create the space for competition and innovation in search, we are taking action to support the freedom to seek information. Our Search Choices implementation enables search across all the English Language search indexes with just one click.”