@conscious.app: Mojeek, an independent alternative to Google, built its own index of over 9 billion pages from scratch and has refused to track users for 20+ years. A search engine's index is its own copy of the web, built by software called a crawler. Most search engines sold as private alternatives don't have one. DuckDuckGo, for example, gets most of its results from Microsoft's Bing. Mojeek began in 2004 as developer Marc Smith's personal project, run from his bedroom on two donated servers. It says it has grown without venture capital, funded by private individuals, and Smith holds sole voting control. Mojeek says it published the first search privacy policy to rule out tracking, in 2006. Its policy says it doesn't record your IP address, the number that identifies your connection, so it can't tie your searches or clicks to you. Mojeek says it never manually reorders results to push a viewpoint, and said in 2020 it had received no government requests to remove results or hand over user data. It's hosted in an award-winning green data centre in Kent, England. Mojeek's index is still far smaller than Google's, so very niche or recent searches can come up thin. It earns money mainly by selling index access to other companies, including AI firms, plus ads based only on your search. In 2024, a US federal judge ruled Google illegally kept a monopoly over online search, which Google is appealing. Mojeek also proposed "noml" in 2023, a tag that lets websites block AI training while staying searchable. Find more ethical alternatives to big tech on the Conscious Spend app.

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Tuesday 27 October 2026 19:32:30 GMT