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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

https://commoncrawl.org/

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.