Ask anyone to name the first search engine that comes to mind and there’s a high likelihood they’ll say Google. It hasn’t always been this way. Over the past three decades, the answer to that question has also been Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, WebCrawler, AOL Search, or Netscape. British search engine company Mojeek is hoping to be the next name that web surfers turn to, and is building its own crawling technology to challenge Google’s hegemony.
“The monopoly Google has over search, it’s not healthy,” says Colin Hayhurst, CEO of Sussex-based Mojeek. “Can you imagine if we got all our news from the New York Times, Washington Post and that was it – do you want two US sources?”
Mojeek plans to take on Google’s search dominance by building its own catalogue of internet content in a way that requires as little data collection as possible....