TIL German search engine Ecosia and French search engine Qwant have started teaming up since last year to build a European search index
Historically, they have both been relying mostly on the Bing index, with Qwant building its own index for a while and serving a mix.
https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/Open linkView original on jlai.lu426
Comments14
I've been carefully optimistic about this - even if ecosia and qwant decide to start heavily serve ads it still means we have an alternative which will supplement privacy focused frontends and metasearch engines.
Both already mostly relied mostly on ads before this partnership. Nothing changed. But perhaps they will need less ads if running their own search index is cheaper than using Bing's.
Would love this. Hopefully Qwant and Ecosia can make it happen soon.
Either way, I use ecosia without as blockers because I want this to happen asap.
Read about this the other day - a great collab!
Nice. I'll keep an eye on this!
I hope the engine isn't called "eusp", but other than that, really excited for this!
I hope it'll be opensource...
@oce There's also @Mojeek which already has it!
UK based, interesting, first time I hear about it. How good is it? Maybe they could make a trio.
That's really gEUd to hear! I'll give it a try
More than a year later and sadly no real update.
There is also OWS which is EU funded and I think a lot more interesting as they do not have a business to run. From what I can tell it is a lot more transparent/active, you can already download data sets from here: https://openwebindex.eu/owler/our_datasets
Haven't heard about it, thank you.