Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index

https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/

by amarcheschi • 1 year ago

543 158 1 year ago

blog.ecosia.org

GuestFAUniverse• 1 year ago

Excellent! -- despite being overdue.

I hope these Europe-based joint ventures increase in every aspect.

n_ary• 1 year ago

I am not so helpful and exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.

Qwant at its launch was immensely performant and they had the beautiful “lite.qwant.com” same as DuckDuckGo lite, but eventually they deprecated that and bloated the homepage.

Ecosia was also less cluttered and performant, now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website or something and has more ads.

What I think will eventually happen is, both will collaborate and build the next generation of previous Yahoo! and fail.

matt-p2• 1 year ago

I agree. Unfortunate because a https://www.mojeek.com/ and ecosia partnership would be genuinely fruitful.

timeon4• 1 year ago

exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.

Well this is the old article (maybe not 6 but few months).

ost-ing• 1 year ago

Ecosia was also less cluttered and performant, now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website

Definitely does feel that way, their design team needs to change that asap

mrweasel• 1 year ago

now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website

The front page, yeah, maybe. If you use the search directly from the browser you just get a clean looking results page. As for the ads, still WAAAY less than Google.

That's not to say that it can't improve, but I'm not really seeing anyone doing it better currently.

palata• 1 year ago

Great!

Does anyone know how Ecosia/Qwant compare with Kagi? I have been a happy user of Kagi for years, but it wouldn't hurt to support a non-US alternative these days.

drannex• 1 year ago

Qwant was my default for quite awhile before Kagi and their results were better than DDG, by far. They have had their own index for quite sometime, and will back-fill with Bing (iirc) if they have very few results, and Ecosia is just Bing, that's about it.

On Qwant your queries _may_ have to be phrased just slightly differently (more old school - less questions based such as "what is the standard bike chain size" and more keywords based such as "bike chain roller standard size") which is how it should be, overall imo.

They have very limited settings to fine-tune, but overall their results were great.

maelito• 1 year ago

Qwant is Bing. I've been comparing a few searches, it gave me about the same results as bing.

matt-p2• 1 year ago

I find mojeek.com better than either of those, but slightly worse than google and on par-ish with bing (bing has further "reach", but worse quality).

AlienRobot• 1 year ago

When I try to access Qwant I get "Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country". I don't think I've ever gotten this message from a search engine. I'm from Brazil.

PartiallyTyped• 1 year ago

I pay for Kagi, and I wouldn't mind paying as much for a European sovereign alternative.

dismalaf2• 1 year ago

Very nice.

Due to recent events I'm trying to divest from US tech as much as possible.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 1 year ago

I think accessing Google search through startpage+adblocker just consumes google's resources without giving them any ad revenue, so it's a way to screw them.

Vaslo• 1 year ago

Americans are really not too worried about it.

dismalaf2• 1 year ago

They should be. Their position as the leader of the free world gave them enormous soft power. If every American multinational loses a significant portion of their overseas business it's going to be a significant hit to the US economy.

Edit: Check out the markets today...

nickpsecurity2• 1 year ago

I'd rather see an open, search index whose URL's and scraping properties are shared with others. Then, small players, even researchers, can just rescrape the likely-good sites to build their own local stores. The whole Web filtered down to what is likely to be useful and safe (no malware) for a wide variety of people.

If it needs to be paid for, then a commercial product that's priced by organization size. Given to researchers for free if their outputs are non-commercial or permissive licensed. Discounted otherwise. I usually start with how Windows is priced for personal or server use to be profitable and widely accessible.

That would let people re-create data sets like RefinedWeb without violating copyright law. You'd still have to consider terms of service, contract law, etc. We have stronger, legal defenses of scraping for internal use, especially non-commercial. Knocking out copyright issues would be a huge help.

latexr• 1 year ago

https://commoncrawl.org/

nickpsecurity2• 1 year ago

Common Crawl isn't open source. It's license has many, specific restrictions. Some are often interpreted in specific ways that could be censoree due to politics. I'm not sure what CC organizations interpretations are, though.

I did think they'd be the best at making the URL part of what I described. Their CC dumps are copyright infringement (file sharing) but links probably would be legal. It would need to be released under an open-source license without their extra terms.

Alternatively, a no-terms license given to specific, paying parties for internal use. Alternatively, released under non-commercial use with low, recurring prices for (a) commercial use and (b) regular updates on link Metadata. Paid alternatives might be good for their funding.

I can't use them right now, though, because I can't guarantee all my or customers' uses meet all likely interpretations of their terms. I'm not even sure how to put best effort in that. I'd rather them just publish their metadata under Apache license or something.

ricardo812• 1 year ago

I think there's a few problems with that kind of setup. Quick thoughts:

- Content creators have less discretion on who to allow/block crawling for when there's a middleman index (probably doesn't matter so much now given the flagrant use of content for AI)

- Content recency. The data sizes can get quite huge, and certain pages require updates more often than others so who gets to decide (one user of the index may be interested in a different set of pages vs another)

- Centralised content on the likes of Reddit, who are already aggressively blocking most bots from crawling their content. You'd have to crawl many pages per day (and quite likely end up getting blocked) as generally only a handful of bots get favourable treatment to crawl sites more aggressively.

immibis2• 1 year ago

So you can't block search engines other than your favorite - that's a positive. If you want to block one you have to block them all.

Recency is not a problem any more than it's a problem for one individual search crawler

mdaniel2• 1 year ago

- Content recency. The data sizes can get quite huge, and certain pages require updates more often than others

I have always imagined that having an open crawl corpus aligns closely with the goals of the Internet Archive, where one could already strictly speaking submit updates to with second-level precision based on their URL slugs. The bad news is that with any such common corpus it would actually worsen their bandwidth bill since I would highly suspect that a corpus would be read from much more than it would ingest (e.g. snap https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318384 once but then every downstream corpus consumer would read from IA n times)

While typing this out, I actually wonder if the big search players don't maintain "page diffs" in their index such that loading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43311573 an hour ago and then loading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43311573 now stores only the new content

so who gets to decide (one user of the index may be interested in a different set of pages vs another)

Surely that's a solved problem in that a common corpus would ingest updates to all frontier pages that it knows about, and exponentially back-off as it finds less and less updates. I don't think the CommonCrawl.org cited by the sibling comment is selective about updates, and unquestionably IA does not: they accept snapshot requests from anyone for what I presume is any URL

layer82• 1 year ago

In the meantime, the German-based GOOD search engine [0] might be alternative. It uses Brave’s independent search index, which according to [1] was also largely developed in Germany.

[0] https://good-search.org/

[1] https://en.reset.org/the-good-search-engine-web-search-witho...

guywithahat3• 1 year ago

Yandex is also pretty good, they have their own index and it's a lot better than Google on political stuff (as long as the news isn't too recent) and any sort of torrent site.

fifilura3• 1 year ago

Europeans will not start using a Muscovite search engine.

(Edit: R -> Muscovite)

solarkraft• 1 year ago

I don’t think anyone in their right mind is advocating severing ties with the USA to get closer to Russia.

kome3• 1 year ago

yandex is very very good. i wonder why is not used more.

Cu3PO42• 1 year ago

Thank you for bringing this to my attention! I've been considering switching to Kagi because paying for a service if I don't want to get advertisements just seems like the reasonable thing to do, but I also wanted to reduce my dependence on US companies.

GOOD charges €2/month for unlimited search. I wonder why their costs are so much lower than Kagi's. Maybe Brace's pricing for their index is much cheaper than building your own?

AndreasRenner3• 1 year ago

Hi, our 2€/month is indeed a low-entry. About 20% of our users pay voluntarily more to support our mission. As a social enterprise, we do not want to make profits on the subscription, but rather keep it low-cost or support our mission. In the end, it's a mixed calculation, which largely depends on how many searches an average users does (we assume around 80). By the way, Kagi has not built an own index; their model is pretty close to ours.

AndreasRenner3• 1 year ago

Hi, the Brave search feed is largely based on the ground work of the former Munich-based German startup Cliqz, whose technology formed the basis of Brave Search. We as a German purpose enterprise seek to work with best independent technologies and currently focus on Brave Search. We can also access UK-based Mojeek and we are in touch with the Qwant/Ecosia startup who will likely have another independent search feed ready in French mid 2025, and in German possibly early 2026 (it's a guess though). Andreas, Co-Founder GOOD Search

user876• 1 year ago

Is anyone aware of an AAAA search index? Or a search engine specifically for use on ipv6 (only) networks? Currently every search engine reachable over ipv6 just returns a lot of unreachable results

crossroadsguy2• 1 year ago

I think something like this could be the “the” web search future. Open or Openish search engines banding together to provide an open and free (as in free beer, yes!) search experience with a common source/index. Maybe DDG and Brave should join as well (ie get involved directly).

While something like Kagi is nice, at best they can become a bespoke and expensive, and maybe excellent as well, suit maker on an experience stretch of a very expensive city. I don’t think general search is that.

scarab92• 1 year ago

Why?

There’s been dozens of attempts at this that have all failed because there’s no real market demand for it. “Open source” is not a feature in most cases.

What exactly would this do that is an unmet need of enough users to make it worthwhile?

alpaca128• 1 year ago

"Open source” is not a feature in most cases.

I think it’s definitely seen as one by people who understand it and what it can prevent. Similar to how many people don’t seem to care (or rather don’t think) about privacy until it dawns on them once a lack of privacy bites them.

But you are right that it’s not really a marketable feature for a wide audience.

dmje2• 1 year ago

I'm using Kagi (and really loving it - when I have to go back to Google which I rarely do nowadays, I'm really shocked by the terrible noise/signal ratio) - and watching their business with interest.

It seems to me that there are always spaces in a market for companies that aren't necessarily looking for world domination in a segment, but just want a sustainable business which does their thing pretty well. ie - Kagi doesn't have to be The Google Killer, it just has to work well enough that people like me give them money and like what they get in return.

Kagi became profitable in 2024 after 2 years of business, and that's even with the (probably considerable?) (current) costs of using Google's index. If they carry on being a niche business, but one that continues to grow (currently 41k members [0]) then that works nicely for me, and presumably lots of other people like me. They don't have to be "general search", they just have to be good enough that people pay for it.

[0] https://kagi.com/stats

lolinder• 1 year ago

In fact, Kagi benefits enormously from being small enough that no one is SEOing for them. Google's adversarial game of algorithmic whack-a-mole is very expensive and hard to keep up. Kagi doesn't have to play the game because they're not a target.

carlosjobim• 1 year ago

It seems to me that there are always spaces in a market for companies that aren't necessarily looking for world domination in a segment, but just want a sustainable business which does their thing pretty well.

Yes, this is what constitutes between 99% and 100% of the world economy.

submeta• 1 year ago

All the world moves on to LLM based RAG like search engines (Perplexity and the likes), but in 2025 Europe starts to build a classic search engine to rival Google.

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

I am so ready for it.

Palmik2• 1 year ago

You realize that an index is still necessary for RAG?

Where do you think the results used by Perplexity, Open AI etc. come from?

osmarks• 1 year ago

There is at least one organization doing actual embedding-based search (Exa). I wrote about this a bit: https://docs.osmarks.net/hypha/osmarks.net_web_search_plan_%....

silversmith2• 1 year ago

This reminds me of the twitter conversation I saw - someone cheering on the dismantling of US meteorological service, because they have weather apps on their phone.

Pooge5• 1 year ago

I don't know... I just don't trust France and Germany all that much with privacy-friendly services... [1][2][3]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-e...

[2] https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275795

atoav• 1 year ago

These are proposals, US services are even less trustworthy — since the patriot act at least.

Given the way the US is acting even if the Europeans didn't give a damn about encryption and just wanted to run on a stable, reliable service that isn't going to be suddenly abused for geopolitical purposes, they could do better than choosing services from the US.

preisschild• 1 year ago

Those laws weren't passed. The US Cloud Act and others were.

pjc502• 1 year ago

US interprets "privacy" as against government while allowing unlimited corporate privacy invasion - and in practice quite a large amount of spook privacy invasion through that. EU addresses corporate privacy invasion while having a compromise in law enforcement privacy.

Pooge5• 1 year ago

Like when they used the Covid app location data to investigate a murder?[1]

[1] https://metro.co.uk/2022/01/12/german-police-tracked-down-re...

timeon4• 1 year ago

If you do not trust France and Germany because of proposed laws against privacy that did not pass there then who do you trust?

Pooge5• 1 year ago

It's a good point, but I'm not going to trust a country where the executive branch used data that was supposed to be used for health purposes for criminal investigations (Germany).

The executive branch of the other one arrested someone for using encryption tools and "protecting [himself] against the exploitation of [his] personal data by GAFAM".

weinzierl• 1 year ago

I'd be very careful with Qwant.

They have taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment.

If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly.

Ecosia looks a lot better at first sight. No obvious ties to traditional media and they make no secret out of their political affiliations. Yet, I doubt they are profitable. I have no energy today to go down that rabbit hole but I'd like to see where their money really comes from.

bad_user2• 1 year ago

Yes, be careful with Qwant, use Google or Bing.

VSerge• 1 year ago

Qwant is infamous in France for having made big claims and failed repeatedly. It was for the longest time just a wrapper around Bing, while claiming otherwise.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 1 year ago

I can confirm this. I was already cautious with Qwant because it was, from the very beginning, the worst search engine I've ever seen.

amarcheschi4• 1 year ago

At this point, basically most of my searches on the web are either through brave search, or on Google followed by "... Reddit". At least in the not so distant past, I've found qwant to be slightly worse than google

rcMgD2BwE72F• 1 year ago

Why not try Kagi? Serious question.

staticelf• 1 year ago

So... why would you be more careful with that than Google or Bing? No matter what search engine you use, you will have a company with their agenda behind it.

dantondwa• 1 year ago

Ecosia is a non-profit, so being profitable is not their mission. Each month they publish a breakdown of their expenses and donations. In January they got around 4 million euros, so I’d say they are certainly successful at what they do.

short_sells_poo5• 1 year ago

Ecosia is a non-profit, so being profitable is not their mission.

So was OpenAI, but people develop amazingly flexible morals when someone throws big $$$ at them. Not saying this will happen to Ecosia, I wish them all the best, but at this point I have zero trust in promises and statements like "we'll never do X".

Again, that's not to say they are unscrupulous, they might have the best intentions of "never doing X", but such promises are extremely difficult to keep if they ever become a huge success.

pythux• 1 year ago

If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly.

Your sentence seems to imply that Cliqz was collecting "[the] data" like American companies (which companies? Which data?). Can you clarify what you are referring to?

Disclaimer: I worked at Cliqz

baxtr• 1 year ago

thx for reminding me. The Cliqz story was absolutely insane. I think they burnt over 100 mio euros for basically nothing. They had no strategy whatsoever.

h1fra• 1 year ago

Qwant is led by one of the most questionable CEO in France. Driven by pure ego and bad management. Instead of building one good product (search), they tried to compete with almost everyone, and especially with every Google products (qwant mail, qwant maps, qwant music, etc.)

tcit• 1 year ago

Léandri left Qwant 5 years ago though, and most of their plans for mail, maps, etc have been abandoned.

The new owner is Octave Klaba (from OVH).

qwertox• 1 year ago

The Axel Springer-Verlag (Publisher) is nothing to be toying around with and accepting money from them is like making a deal with the devil. They own the news from the entire range of lower working class up to the upper middle class and have no hesitation in using those channels to brainwash those targets with the political views which Mathias Döpfner wants to be seen spread.

Second to none in Germany, but probably normal in the US.

BSDobelix• 1 year ago

>Axel Springer-Verlag (Publisher) is nothing to be toying around with

The real question is:

Is Elliot Carver (from James Bond -> Tomorrow Never Dies) based on Mathias Döpfner or Rupert Murdoch?

morkalork• 1 year ago

Would you say they are comparable to Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black then?

luckylion• 1 year ago

They own the news from the entire range of lower working class up to the upper middle class

With a 10% market share? Come on.

dumbledoren• 1 year ago

Considering how German government is persecuting people for being pro-Palestine, I wouldn't want to share one bit of data with German entities.

nottorp2• 1 year ago

French and German results :)

That may work for finding a pizza near you, but most of the content on the web is in English and like it or not, English is the most common language even across the EU.

Separating the EU internet across languages doesn't look like such a good idea to me. Except for getting funding from the nazi parties.

StefanBatory• 1 year ago

I wanted to use Bing, but I had to go back to Google - as it is absolutely awful for finding stuff in Polish, my native language.

Programming might be English but our lives aren't all in English.

Also, I don't get your argument at the end. Are you saying they're funded by Nazi parties?

nottorp2• 1 year ago

I'm saying it's easy to get the nazi/right wing to vote for state funding for such a project because it's "nationalist".

Programming might be English but our lives aren't all in English.

Yep. I look up restaurants/stores/medical clinics near me on Google because that's where they are. Mostly on Maps not the search engine tho.

But it's not only programming. How's the Polish wikipedia on any random topic of international interest that you want to check out? The Romanian wikipedia is usually ... much shorter than the English one. With the exception of local topics of course.

oskarw85• 1 year ago

I switched to Qwant 2 months ago after using DuckDuckGo for 4 years and Google before that. I live in Poland - and Qwant gives me the best search results of them all. Much more relevant than DuckDuckGo and much less sponsored content than Google. I'm really happy about how it works for me.

prmoustache2• 1 year ago

I read that as a starting point.

Lots of people in French and german speaking countries do search in their respective language, as do spanish and chinese speaking people.

I don't see it as separating the eu internet accross language. I bet Google/Bing and any search engine has a language metadata in its index anyway and I don't understand your link with nazi parties.

slevis• 1 year ago

With Ecosia I always have to think about the actual impact of planting trees. Imo there are better options to help the climate. And I have zero trust that tracking progress in some countries is really possible. But better than nothing.

kome3• 1 year ago

guys... you really flagged a comment for saying that yandex is actually a good alternative? seriously?

immibis2• 1 year ago

Yes they did. The suggestion that another country made something better than the USA did isn't popular inside companies whose sole purpose is to fund the forefront of the USA's innovation which is evidently not good enough.

Click on the timestamp to go to the individual comment's page and then click "vouch". It may not appear if you haven't used the site for long enough, though.

kome3• 1 year ago

I had NO idea about this feature... thanks!

benrutter2• 1 year ago

Excellent news! Europe obviously has good reasons to try and remove reliance on US tech/goods right now, but even ignoring this, it's really positive that the small world of search indexes is growing.

It's probably not controversial to say that search has stagnated a little lately, hopeful more competition will improve things for everyone.

moooo992• 1 year ago

Unfortunately Qwant has received major investments from Axel Springer which makes it an absolute no-go for me.

A little disappointed with Ecosia in this regard to be honest, considering many Springer affiliated outlets are notorious for pushing everything that is perfectly contrary to Ecosia‘s mission statement.

Epa095• 1 year ago

Why are you dissapointed in Ecosia for Qwant getting investment from Springer?

moooo992• 1 year ago

Im disappointed they still partnered up despite the investment from Springer

Fnoord2• 1 year ago

(2024)

This news is from mid December 2024.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

"We're excited to mark the next stage of tech autonomy because it means that we are giving ourselves more freedom to build the future of green tech that we want."

If truly want "tech autonomy" why not share the index as a public resource, giving everyone "freedom to build".

niemandhier• 1 year ago

The discussion in this thread shows why despite lots of talent Europe has no build large tech companies.

heraldgeezer• 1 year ago

Sounds good, I'll test this out for a while.

I am using a combo of you.com and DuckDuckGo, and I really like the ddg bangs, does Ecosia have this?

Can I also customize the start page, it is a bit "loud".

Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index

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