Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option.
Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them?
Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized.
I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results.
I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.
It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking.
Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done.
Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.
Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them?
Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized.
I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results.
I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.