What Mojeek actually does
Mojeek is a search engine run by a small, independently registered UK company, Mojeek Ltd, based in Brighton, England. What sets it apart from most of the field isn't a feature, it's the fact that it runs its own web crawler and maintains its own index, built from scratch since 2004, rather than licensing or reselling results from a larger provider.
The core product
Mojeek is free to use through its standard web interface, can be set as the default search engine in any major browser, and is also available as a browser extension. It's funded by advertising tied to the search term itself rather than to a personal profile, and the company states it does not track users or store search history.
That combination, its own index plus non-personalized ad funding, is genuinely rare: most alternative search engines, including several other entries on this site, are metasearch products or Bing/Google resellers under the hood, while Mojeek's core index is its own.
What's new or notable
Mojeek isn't chasing feature parity with the big search engines. There's no maps layer, no shopping panel, and no AI-generated answer summary bolted on top, which is a deliberate choice rather than a gap the company is trying to close. The tradeoff for that independence and simplicity shows up most on mainstream, high-competition, and very recent queries, where an index built and maintained by a small team returns fewer and less complete results than a search engine crawling the web at Google or Bing's scale.
Who should use Mojeek
Great fit if…
- Having a genuinely independent index matters to you — Mojeek is one of a small number of search engines worldwide running its own crawler and index rather than reselling someone else's results.
- You want ads tied to your search term, not a stored profile — Mojeek states it funds itself this way and doesn't track individual users.
- You want a simple, no-frills search experience — there's no AI answer layer or clutter of extra panels to load or ignore.
- You're happy setting it as your browser's default rather than installing a dedicated app — switching takes a few minutes with no new software to learn.
Skip it if…
- You regularly search for mainstream or very recent topics — the smaller independent index returns thinner results here than a large commercial index would.
- You want a dedicated mobile app — Mojeek has none; mobile use means setting it as your default search engine in the phone's browser.
- You expect maps, shopping, or AI-generated answers built in — Mojeek's feature set is deliberately minimal and doesn't include these.
Pricing in detail
Mojeek carries no paid tier; the entire product, including the browser extension, is free.
| Plan | Price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Mojeek search | €0 | Web search on its own independently built index, usable as a default search engine or via browser extension |
Where it falls short
- Thinner coverage on some queries — an independent index built by a small team cannot match the raw coverage of a search engine crawling the web at a much larger scale, which shows most on mainstream, high-competition, or very recent queries.
- No dedicated mobile app — using Mojeek on a phone means setting it as the default search engine in the mobile browser rather than installing a standalone app.
- Deliberately minimal features — the product has no maps, shopping panels, or AI-generated answer summaries that larger search engines now bundle in.
Privacy & data
Mojeek's core privacy claim is straightforward: it states it does not track individual users or store search history tied to a person, and its advertising is matched to the search query rather than to a stored profile, which removes much of the incentive for the kind of behavioral tracking larger ad-funded search engines rely on.
Being an independently owned company running its own index also means your queries aren't being routed through, or shared with, a larger search or ad-tech provider the way they would be with a metasearch or Bing/Google-reselling product.
We did not find a published independent security audit or open-source release of Mojeek's search stack on the pages checked, so we can't confirm those specifics beyond the company's own no-tracking statement.
How we checked this
This entry is based on Mojeek's own site (mojeek.com), checked on 2026-09-04, together with the verified verdict, feature list, and known limitations compiled for this entry, including its founding date, index scope, and the absence of a mobile app. We did not run our own search-quality benchmarking against Mojeek's index; the assessment of coverage and independence reflects documented and publicly stated facts rather than a side-by-side comparison we performed.