Discovering Mojeek — how this privacy-conscious David is fighting back against the search industry Goliaths

US tech firms dominate the search landscape. Google has a near-monopoly on the market (~90%) with Bing (Microsoft) and Baidu soaking almost all (~9%) of the rest of the pie. As we become increasingly concerned about privacy and how our data is used, society and industry desperately need real and better alternatives.

With Google having such power over our access to information they get to shape what is understood. Come to think of it, why have we let Google’s algorithms decide what becomes truth?

I spoke with Colin Hayhurst, the newly appointed CEO of Mojeek — an independent and privacy-centric search engine that aims to provide an alternative. Started by Marc Smith in 2004 and having been a business since 2009, the team has always worked remotely. Marc, Colin and most of the team are based in Sussex.

“If you are seeking information outside the bubble of Google and Bing, Mojeek is one of the very few alternatives out there,” says Colin. “Services like DuckDuckGo, Startpage and Ecosia still use search results supplied by Google and Bing, whereas our results come from our own independent search index, database and ranking. Since we have a strict no-tracking policy, you can use our search engine privately, without your data being collected.”

Searching for something new

It’s clear from the off that Colin is incredibly passionate about both the Mojeek business and user privacy. He’s genuinely excited to be able to offer an alternative to the US search giants. But the team aren’t trying to compete with Google or Bing — instead, they cater to privacy-concerned users who are aware of the risks of blindly handing over swathes of their personal data.

“Back in 2010, I began to have a deep interest in privacy with particular concerns about Facebook. I was one of the original backers of Diaspora and started developing an app in that space (a federated contact database). Since then, I’ve been involved in several ventures and projects. One was GoScale, which was part of the Y Combinator batch in 2012. When that collapsed, I took on the role of Innovations Fellow in Physics at Sussex University.”

But Colin didn’t take his eye off his focus on privacy. “I was co-organising a large privacy meetup in London for 6 years. And then, in 2019, I met Marc Smith (Mojeek’s Founder and Lead Developer), thinking that our Sussex spinout DataJavelin could help him out with machine learning. That wasn’t the case, but we immediately clicked with a one-hour meeting turning into four hours. Later, I learned Marc was looking for someone to help him on the business side of things, so when COVID-19 hit DataJavelin very hard, I contacted Marc and asked if I could help.”

Organic success

So what inspired Colin to join Mojeek? “I’ll give you two simple reasons; 1. Marc is awesome; 2. Our world desperately needs alternatives to Big Tech, and US search engines, in particular,” he explains.

Mojeek has a core value of ‘doing what’s right’, and this shines through when Colin talks about the business. When I ask why he enjoys working at Mojeek, he responds; “I think the opportunity to work on something important and impactful is the greatest benefit of all; intangible, yes, but working with a company that is value-driven means that we don’t feel like we are ‘working’ at Mojeek.”

Stacking up

The team consists of Colin, Marc the founder and three other developers. A frontend developer and new Head of Marketing are also about to start. Colin explains that as Mojeek recruits later in the year, two engineering teams will emerge: the Search team that builds and maintains the backend search engine, and the Web team that deals with design, mobile and web apps.

Thanks to Marc having built a full stack independent of any commercial libraries, the business has no dependencies or commercial risks related to that. Mojeek hosts and maintains its own bare-metal servers in the UK’s greenest data centre, Custodian Data Centres in Kent. The team has its own crawler, indexer, database and ranking engine all written in C. Their web services use PHP, they don’t do any tracking, and although they use JavaScript on the frontend, Mojeek’s site works with it disabled, which is important to security-conscious users.

Mojeek has an ambitious roadmap in place for next year. “We have some new innovations that we don’t want to announce ahead of time,” says Colin, “but Maps and Business listings are two of the more conventional things that we look forward to rolling out.”

Optimising for the future

Right now the team has a deeper focus on engaging with users and understanding what they need and want. “It’s an interesting challenge”, Colin says, ”as we will not use, on principle, many of the analytical and tracking tools that most digital marketing companies adopt. Personally speaking, I’m excited about the human conversations we are having as we figure out better user solutions and our priorities.”

“We’ll also be putting a big effort into improving our search results in general. One of the benefits of me joining is that Marc will have more time to work on the algorithm and improve the relevancy of our organic results, all whilst continuing to grow the size of our search index.”

Even though Mojeek has been around for over a decade, an injection of cash from one private investor last year, and Colin joining the team, will no doubt accelerate its growth.

While Mojeek doesn’t yet have the brand awareness levels of some newer privacy-focused search engines, the technology helps it differentiate. “Most users of so-called search engines, like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, don’t even realise the search results are coming from Bing. There only a small handful of real alternatives to Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu, and Mojeek is the largest of these alternatives.” So part of the marketing strategy will revolve around knowledge sharing, about the realities of search.

It’s an exciting time for the team. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal shone a spotlight on privacy concerns, more and more people are starting to question how their data is being used, tracked and sold. And as the population becomes more aware of the business practices of Big Tech, Mojeek is well-positioned to take advantage of this shift.

“We foresee a digitally healthier future for society with multiple search engines providing alternative sources of information,” adds Colin.

“I mean, can you imagine it? Suppose the whole of North America and Europe had just two TV channels, and they were Fox News and Bloomberg TV.”

If you’re interested in finding out more about Mojeek, take a look at the search engine for yourself, or reach out to Colin directly.

Luke Thompson is Digital Lead for Hays Tech in Brighton, the leading technology recruiters in Sussex. Have a question for him? Find him on LinkedIn, Twitter or Luke.Thompson@hays.com.