1w ago

Mojeek: not US but gives far right results?

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 & 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

Trying out Mojeek today, I did a search (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.

Is this common with Mojeek?
Are there ways to adjust its settings so as to not return far right search results?
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?

11 comments

Yeah, Mojeek isn't really there yet imo. I heard Qwant and Ecosia are working on a search engine and crawler together, but you could use one of them until that's released. I personally went with Qwant.
- One reason I thought Mojeek could be my solution was that it can make use of Qwant and Ecosia and others, a metasearch.
  I'll keep experimenting; also trying out Mwmbl and Good-Search.

mojeek may be european but it’s not EU, it’s UK-based, and that makes sense considering the rise of right-wing transphobia in the UK
edit: I use searxng which is a decentralized search engine similar to the fediverse, it lets you customize search providers and i have it set to show ddg, presearch, qwant, and startpage
- searxng which is a decentralized search engine similar to the fediverse, it lets you customize search providers and i have it set to show ddg, presearch, qwant, and startpage
  How do you set it up like so? I couldn't find such settings.
  Anyways, Consider whether using that is the best thing we can be doing for the EU... Using anonymous search engines instead of a local one that will at least profit some and pay taxes here.
  
  there’s an engines section in the settings menu
- I've been using the Firedragon web browser which comes with its own instance of SearxNG as default, but sometimes it gives an error message when I search, and almost always slows me down with a Cloudflare bot check.
  Do you have a preferred SearxNG instance?
  
  hi, i use sx.catgirl.cloud

Surprisingly often I get... nothing. (Granted I misspel things a lot).

I tried to use Mojeek a few months back but results were just too bad even for everyday stuff 😿

11 comments