Presumably because of Brexit, Mojeek is not listed. Is sort-of-interesting how some European lists include/exclude the UK.

https://www.mojeek.com/

One of the largest Western world indexes outside of Bing/Google, own crawler/ranking and privacy friendly.

Redefining Europe to mean something other than the geographical location is a very bad habit of the pro-EU contingent. The EU institutions do this all the time but they aren't the only offenders, which is how Eurovision ends up including Australia and Israel. These people seem to really hate that Europe is a geographically defined landmass (which includes Russia), and would much rather it be a social construct reflecting a specific set of cultural values.

But I guess "EU/EFTA Alternatives" is not as snappy.

Your comment about Eurovision is simply wrong. The countries participating, with the exception of Australia, are all current or prior members of a European Broadcasting Union. The event was devised as content and when Israel joined the broadcasting organization they got the opportunity to pay to participate. Australia is involved because they requested participation as the event is massively popular there.

Europe is a political concept more than it is a geography. Copenhagen and Berlin are tied together by law. Moscow and Berlin are not. Saying “Europe” in this context without reference to politics is meaningless. There is borderless trade within the EU but not with the UK. That is a fundamental difference and just one example.

I don't get it. How is my comment about Eurovision wrong when you then immediately agree with what I just said? It calls itself the European Broadcasting Union and the Eurovision song contest, but as you clearly agree, its membership rules have nothing to do with being in Europe.

Europe is quite obviously not a political concept. It's an ancient word that always has and always will mean a geographical area. You're repeating the exact behavior we are openly criticizing in this thread. Misusing language in that way is not only a cheap attempt to manipulate and socially engineer populations, but actively divisive. This thread is a perfect example. Europe hasn't managed to produce many Google competitors, but there's one in the UK and now the people who run it are hurt and upset because they were excluded from a list that claims to represent all of Europe, but in reality the list is some sort of ideological construct defined by political allegiances.

I really don't think self-proclaimed "European citizens" realize how much damage they do to the continent with this approach. It's not just the UK, I live in Switzerland and these games get noticed here too. Many problems are geographical in nature (war, famine, energy, immigration etc). Europe could use as much collaboration as it can get. Alienating some of the continent's most successful countries is the worst way to bring that about.

Startpage is owned by an American advertising company (System1)

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...

All of these are bing based and/or have US parent Cos. So how exactly are they "European"? A European company put a react UI ontop of the bing API - seriously?

Meanwhile the UK has at least one serious option (e.g https://mojeek.com) with it's own index, possibly larger than yandex and privacy friendly - but can't be included because we're not in the right protectionist club.

Well guys, I hope this works for you. I voted against Brexit, but the behaviour of folks on the continent since has been beyond childish and has been making me reconsider the whole EU concept.

From the homepage:

> As a business that operates in Europe, it is possible to get a VAT refund for products/services of other European companies.

> European companies also tend to offer payment methods that are commonly used in Europe.

> Within the EU, many laws and framework conditions are set by the EU, which helps to cover a large market without having to consider large country-specific differences.

> It is also easier to enforce your rights against another company located in the EU.

That sounds to me like there are plenty legitimate reasons to exclude the UK from a European (Union)-based list.

They do seem to conflate Europe with the EU, which is unfortunate.

UK meets all of these points too FYI :). VAT is not paid/or refunded, we use the same payment methods and many will even accept euros if push comes to shove. GDPR is enshrined in law, we have an EU trade and co-op agreement.

Did they refuse your proposal or is your attitude based only on fact that you have expected it to be there from start?

> protectionist club

> beyond childish

Seems like you have already made your mind.

They refused. It's honestly unfortunate and I desperately wish it wasn't true, but this is actually how it is.

I just tried Mojeek and it's is probably the worst engine I've ever used. My first query I went with something standard out of my niche, "minju kpop" and #1 result was deepfake porn. The subsequent searches in other niches didn't do much better. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Google and pagerank, dude. At least it's not deepfake porn.

I hope you can appreciate that Mojeek is a startup vs the trillion dollar valuations of Bing and Google.

Vanity queries are pretty common for trying new engines.

It's also not a very intuitive query. Maybe you're conditioned to using Google and their vast history of query data that no one else has.

> Vanity queries are pretty common for trying new engines.

Your point was what?

> It's also not a very intuitive query. Maybe you're conditioned to using Google and their vast history of query data that no one else has.

What would have been an intuitive query?

My point was that vanity queries often look for very specific things, and beyond Google and Bing you're struggling to get that. That's the current reality. Maybe ask yourself why.

It's not an intuitive query because it yields about precisely zero results with those two words in a consecutive manner, on Google. You're chucking two spaghetti words together and expecting the search engine to figure out what you mean, which is fine to an extent but OTOH, wth do you mean?

The problem is not their ranking but that by default SafeSearch is off on Mojeek. This is a questionable choice. Click the cog, enable SafeSearch and repeat the query. The deepfake porn is gone.

I just tried Mojeek too, and found the results to be reasonable on a selection of programming related queries. I didn't know Mojeek existed, but the design is clean and the results are fast. Ranking isn't as precise as Google but that's OK, the right result is usually still in the top results. The summarize feature worked well and was also very fast. The news is clean, hopefully more trustworthy than Google News. I love the idea of their Substack search, but they should consider unlaunching it and trying again. Although the rendering of the results is a bit off (the date runs into the URL) the bigger issue is that there doesn't seem to be any way to rank by date, and old blog posts are often near the top. That's probably not what's wanted for a blog search.

Honestly I don't know why this site isn't better known, if it's genuinely an independent index which it seems to be. It feels like Google in the early days. I'll definitely try it out and see how viable its ranking is.

It's really sad (but absolutely 100% predictable) to hear that self-proclaimed "Europeans" refuse to mention it. To such people "Europe" is not and never has been about regional alliances or collaboration. It is and was always a social ideology of control. The UK rejected that system and is thus in their minds no longer "European", despite that it's still there and not going anywhere.

> The problem is not their ranking but that by default SafeSearch is off on Mojeek.

The problem is their ranking also.

Seems like mostly Bing-based.

The only search engine with its own index in Europe (not EU) is Yandex. There is a lot of controversy around it for obvious reasons, but at least it exists

Not true, there's Mojeek.