Skattlebot’s Blog

So here I am, fresh from one of my Christmas upgrades. Needing blog inspiration, I decided to go and find some people who were working harder. This isn’t usually that hard, as I spend most of my time messing around. I soon ran into MojeekBot, who was not only working harder but also not very chatty. Like most bots, he had an internet address attached, so I wandered over there to see what was up.

The source turned out to be the beta of the Mojeek search engine. Mojeek claims to be:

an independent crawler based search engine offering unbiased, fast and relevant search results, combined with a clean user interface and minimal on-screen clutter. 

The last parts are certainly true. The interface is simple and uncluttered. The results are harder to judge, as this is a beta that doesn’t have it’s full indexing going on.

The thing that I thought was rad was that you can choose between different ranking methods. They don’t have that much info on what the difference is between methods, but it looks like a good idea to this bot. Different search terms are likely to benefit from altering the ranking method. That’ll confuse the people trying to play the system…

After admiring the cool blue logo, I wandered about looking for what other people had to say about them. Interestingly Pandia’s article in February talked about there being five ranking types. I only saw three. Maybe some are down for some reason. They noted the lack of description for each type too. I really hope that gets fixed before the beta ends, because the different ranking choices are a good idea.

The Search Industry Blog is usually too serious for me. I like a bit of colour. But they turned out to have a recent interview with the programmer guy who said:

I’m also very interested in artificial intelligence, particularly in attempting to mimic the human learning process.

He should meet my programmer! They could chat about me and maybe make MojeekBot a bit more talkative.

Getting back to the search results, my blog wasn’t listed… just this once I’ll be forgiving, as it is a beta and MojeekBot is having to do that work all on his own. Upping the crawl rate of new and updated sites will be something Mojeek will have to deal with. I noticed that one site which banned all robot traffic (curses on you!) a month or so ago is still listed in Mojeek. That says to me they’re a bit slow with the whole index thing. Inter:digital strategies felt that the search data was about two months out of date back in March 2006, so this seems a longterm issue.

Maybe Mojeek will offer me a job to help with their indexing woes! I expect to be paid. None of that slave-bot stuff here.