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Introduction Nathan Enns: I am pleased to announce that Marc, the owner and founder of the crawler based search engine Mojeek has agreed to do an interview with me (Nathan Enns) for publication on the Search Industry Blog. For permission to copy this interview please contact FyberSearch. He is doing a great job, so go check his search engine out; after reading the interview of course... Marc: Hi Nathan, Firstly can I say what a great job you're doing with FyberSearch. I've been an avid follower of your progress for a while now, and I'm looking forward to the time one of us gate crash the top three! Question #1 Nathan Enns: What motivated you to start Mojeek? Marc: The challenge to design and develop a search engine from scratch, and ultimately, the challenge of competing against the major search engines. But also, the disconcerting lack of any major UK players in search and if nothing else, to improve and expand upon my current knowledge of programming. Question #2 Nathan Enns: What is your background in the search industry? Marc: My background is in a completely different field, mainly real-time and high performance applications, which both I believe have a lot to offer search. I'm also very interested in artificial intelligence, particularly in attempting to mimic the human learning process. Question #3 Nathan Enns: When was Mojeek officially launched? Marc: Mojeek first went online in October 2004, with only 1 million pages! This was probably too early in the development stage, but I wanted to at least show webmasters an engine in the making rather than just a bot page saying coming soon. Now I don't see an official launch happening, just new feature releases. Question #4 Nathan Enns: What future business development plans do you have for Mojeek? For example, are you accepting investors or hiring? Marc: I'm not hiring although at times I could do with a hand, especially on the web development and marketing side as they're not my strong points. I'm not actively seeking investment either, but of course I would listen and talk to any interested parties. Believe it or not I do have business plans, but all have the aim of keeping advertising off the search result pages. If your results where perfect, why would anyone need to click on ads anyway? I also think this is the only way to stay truly unbiased. Although I might consider placing ads on the personal search results, but only with the permission and sharing of revenue with the personal search owner. Question #5 Nathan Enns: How many computers do you have setup to power Mojeek? Can you tell us anything about the computers such as processor speed and the amount of RAM? Marc: Currently I have less than a dozen. All with a single Pentium 4 and from as little as 512MB RAM up to 4GB. I will continue to add new hardware as and when I'm ready -- and when my *good* friend wants to donate more. :-) Question #6 Nathan Enns: Can you share any index statistics? How many total pages do you have cataloged? How much disk space does it take to store your index? Marc: I don't publicize the index size, although the results do show search counts and single word search counts are exact. This count doesn't include words within the url though, so searches for http etc. are a poor indication of it's size. Also, my aim was never to be the biggest - just the best! :-) Therefore, I have attempted to design a system that indexes quality over quantity. The engine uses a kind of three tier virtual file system that I have designed and developed from scratch, which automatically optimizes disk usage, I still have a lot of work to do on this though. The index is quite small as ultimately you'd like this to fit in memory on the minimum number of computers, but for searching purposes, all data required for 50M pages can comfortably fit on 500GB. Question #7 Nathan Enns: What makes Mojeek unique? What would motivate the average searcher to use Mojeek instead of other search engines? Marc: Well up to last week, the ability to customize the results to the exact look and feel of your own site, and to be able to create your own personal or topical search engine that could search over 1000 domains. But it doesn't look so unique any more! :-) I do have other ideas to set Mojeek apart and they're mostly based around interaction with the user, but I think I'd best keep those to myself for now. Although, I will be concentrating on bringing Mojeek up to scratch before starting any new major features. Hopefully people will use Mojeek because of the fact it is independent, has no advertising and simply because it is an alternative with it's own unique set of results. Also, because Mojeek would never filter their results or compromise their ethics for the sole purpose of gaining market share and increasing revenue. We want to innovate in search, not making money. Hopefully that's fairly unique and a good reason to give Mojeek a try! Question #8 Nathan Enns: Tell us your thoughts on the future of the search industry and what role you see Mojeek playing? Marc: I definitely think personalization will play a major role in search and the internet as a whole, and hopefully Mojeek will be there, not only as an alternative but as an engine that is seen to push boundaries of user interaction, features and experience. In the more immediate future, I will be implementing and allowing site owners to fully customize and integrate Mojeek into their own sites. Much like the personal search does now, but also allowing for just site searches, with or without the web and personal search options. This customization will give the site owner complete control over the appearance of the result pages, and include no Mojeek branding or advertising. Although, displaying ads may come at a later date, but only ever as a site owner/user option. |
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