Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech | TechCrunch
techcrunch.comEcosia, the tree-planting search engine from Berlin, and Qwant, France’s privacy-focused search provider, announced a joint venture in November 2024 to develop their own European search index[1][2]. The partnership aims to reduce their dependence on Microsoft’s Bing APIs, which both companies currently rely on for search results[2:1].
The new venture, called European Search Perspective (EUP), is structured as a 50-50 ownership split between Ecosia and Qwant[2:2]. Qwant’s engineering team and existing search index development will transfer to EUP, with Qwant CEO Olivier Abecassis leading the joint venture[2:3].
“The door is open and we are ready to talk to anyone,” said Abecassis, while noting they want to “move as fast as possible” with their existing shareholders’ support[2:4]. The index will begin serving France-based search traffic for both engines by Q1 2025, expanding to cover “a significant portion” of German traffic by end of 2025[2:5].
Rising API costs are a key motivator, following Microsoft’s massive price hike for Bing’s search APIs in 2023[2:6]. However, neither company plans to completely stop using Bing or Google, instead aiming to diversify their technical foundation as generative AI takes a more central role in search[2:7].
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 124 users / day
- 1.05K users / week
- 1.3K users / month
- 4.58K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 4.07K Posts
- 103K Comments
- Modlog
I’ve been using SearX for over a year now. https://priv.au/
It returns old-school, unranked results. It currently has at least 50 Instances you can choose from. https://searx.space/
It’s the only real way to go.
Cool cool cool.
My go to test is to search for water shoes / swimming shoes that are either size EU 48 or extra wide.
This shiet can’t even find only “water shoes”, instead recommending shoes to me.
Seems to be useless trash-proxy to Bing and Google?
What do you mean by unranked? Because it doesn’t maintain its own database, just proxies other search engines and aggregates them
Furthermore, priv.au seems to include only Google in its default search engines so its really just Google through a proxy. Good for privacy but doesn’t really help you get away from big tech
4get is wayyyyy better imo, here’s a list of many instances. https://4get.ca/instances (my instance https://4get.lurx.net/)
Edit: because I think it’s funny as well, here is the creator of 4get self made comparison between 4get and searx
I don’t know from where he got the 2Gb RAM usage because my searxng instance uses 45MiB of RAM.
Woah, this is cool.
To me, it looks like it basically anonymizes your search through a search engine of your choice.
Meaning, you can still use google for a search if you choose, but the data they would usually collect is out of reach.
Am I understanding this correctly?
You are correct, it is just a privacy respecting meta search engine! I self host my own instance, another thing to love.
Very cool, but this is old news from 2024. I wonder how they’re doing now.
I think it has already launched, but still only serving a small portion of traffic
Edit: it has https://staan.ai/
Barf i thought it was going to be actual search not ai
Its both actual search and AI-features (which I’m unable to tell you more about right now as I merely skimmed through the description of the AI-features to verify that the search index will also serve plain, old, actual search).
Gross
As soon as I saw the post, I thought, “you mean AI?”. Yup.
Cool! Perhaps I’ll give Qwant another shot. Thanks for sharing :)
Switched to Qwant about a month ago, and it seems fine so far. I guess it’s time to expand this experiment to my other computers as well.
They could continue funding Marginalia Search and other NLnet projects such as Stract.
Those are real independent indexes.
Broseph, this link rounds up to a year old.
November 2024. Remember how innocent we all were back then?
wE’Re not GoiNg bAcK!!!
WE WILL WIN! WE WON’T REST!
lol, now it’s “we won’t resist…”
I used qwant in the past somewhat, briefly, but this made me switch entirely and will make an effort this time to stick with it.
Please at least make it available to use with SearXNG
genuine question; would a council moderated federated search index work? i say moderated just to keep out right wing, bigoted sites, and csam. but like a search index not owned by one company
edit: stupid typos T_T
Seeing how some Lemmy instances are a little too ban-happy, I don’t think I’d want centralized moderation. The current closest thing would be Yacy. I’ve been playing around with Yacy, but the ranking sucks and is slow (I believe the Page Rank algorithm is turned off by default because it would make it even slower).
That is one hell of a typo
grr oops i meant out ugh T_T
deleted by creator
It’s late in the day. Perplexity Set itself up as a search engine with AI. Don’t know whose index they use.
I rarely use a search engine anymore directly. I used to use Startpage which is/was a proxy for Google. And everybody knows how useful Google’s results are these days.
So I use Perplexity for search.
Well that sounds terrible
Since we’re on c/privacy; from perplexity itself:
What Does Perplexity Do With User Information?
Perplexity:
Collects: Search history, queries, device and location data, browsing activity, and navigational behavior (especially via its new AI-powered browser).
Uses: These data points help personalize results, train their models, improve functionality, and—crucially—build detailed user profiles for targeted ads and marketing.
Potential Risks: Privacy experts warn this data collection may turn users into marketing profiles, similar to surveillance practices seen in other big tech companies. Even actions outside the Perplexity app (via their browser) may be tracked and leveraged.
Transparency and Privacy: Perplexity does not offer strong privacy protections (like end-to-end encryption), and isn’t fully transparent about how all user information is used. Cookies, device fingerprinting, and web beacons may track even non-logged-in users.
Enterprise risks: Businesses using Perplexity’s enterprise tools must be cautious about uploading sensitive data, as it could be used for model training and not always protected from leaks.
Andisearch privacy policy:
https://andisearch.com/privacy/
Very fair point. I’m embarrassed. Sorry.
No need to apologize, but it’s good to be aware of the policies of various applications you use and promote.
I use perplexity occasionally myself, aware of the above, so I only do more general searches with it.
I have a self-hosted Perplexica instance I use for anything more sensitive.
There was a need to apologise; I was very wrong in context. So there! 😜 (I don’t see the point in maintaining a position which is entirely shown to be fatally flawed.)
Thank-you for pointing to Perplexica. When I subscribed (for a year), Perplexity - unlike ChatGPT -was alone in giving references so I could avoid citing rubbish by checking unless I knew them; now they all cite. I won’t be resubscribing and to have you refer this is really helpful. 😁
Thank-you.
Every time I’m reminded about Ecosia I go to their AI and burn some electricity.
How is it in terms of privacy and results now? I tried it a month or two back and it was not good. I really want to get behind tree planting but these issues are a block
Well, until now it’s an alpha, only with a little more as the crappy Bing API, but I think that it will raise fast when are the collaboration with all other EU search engine begin to work as planned. At the moment I’ll continue with Andi (IMHO the best AI search ever), Startpage and Mojeek, which offers the best results and privacy.