- Ecosia and Qwant partnered to build a european search index to reduce the dependence on US tech firms.
- The European Search Perspective, their new search index
What happened
Two Google rival search engines, Ecosia and Qwant, launched a collaboration on Tuesday to create a European search index and lessen their reliance on US Big Tech companies. The European Search Perspective, or EUSP, is a joint venture between the two internet search companies that has a 50/50 ownership split.
The company plans to deliver “improved” French and German language search results when it launches in France in early 2025.
Qwant’s headquarters are in Paris, whilst Ecosia’s are in Berlin. The privacy-conscious search engine Qwant pledges not to follow users or sell their personal information. With an emphasis on sustainability, Ecosia’s search engine promises to plant one tree for each 50 queries that are made on its network.
“We are European companies and we need to build technology that makes sure no third-party decision — for instance, Microsoft’s decision to increase costs to access their search API — could jeopardize our business,” Olivier Abecassis, CEO of Qwant stated.
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Why it’s important
Google, the leading search engine with over 90% of the global market, today controls the majority of the search infrastructure, which is what allows us to get the accurate information from input. Ecosia, Qwant, and DuckDuckGo do not currently build their own back-end systems. They will create their own search index from the ground up for the new endeavor, although they need to gather results from a variety of search engines. Ecosia last year switched to a mix of Google and Bing search results.
Many other search engines, worldwide saying, including Ecosia and Qwant, must rely on technology already in place from firms like Microsoft and Google for search results. Europeans are very dependent on US technology and the Trump election could escalate the tension, these two reasons being the need of the innovative rise of European’s own search engines.
Aside from that, the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots like OpenAI and Perplexity pushes Google to develop its own generative AI search products.
