Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech | TechCrunch
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Qwant, France's privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and

Ecosia, 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].

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  • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    20 hours ago

    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

    • sobchak@programming.dev
      2·
      16 hours ago

      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).

    • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
      2·
      22 hours ago

      i say moderated just to keep our right wing, bigoted sites, and csam

      That is one hell of a typo