12 ms·
Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index
- koreanguy 2y ago[dead]
- submeta 2y agoAll 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 2y agoI am so ready for it.
- Palmik 2y agoYou realize that an index is still necessary for RAG? Where do you think the results used by Perplexity, Open AI etc. come from?
- osmarks 2y agoThere 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_%28secret%29 https://docs.osmarks.net/hypha/osmarks.net_web_search_plan_%....
- Palmik 2y agoYes, I know Exa and have used them in the past for some side projects. Great product. But that's still an index. Google also internally uses combination of traditional and sematic/embedding based indices.
- silversmith 2y agoThis 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.
- guappa 2y agoAll the apps use the norwegian service anyway
- GuestFAUniverse 2y agoExcellent! -- despite being overdue. I hope these Europe-based joint ventures increase in every aspect.
- n_ary 2y agoI 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-p 2y agoI agree. Unfortunate because a https://www.mojeek.com/ https://www.mojeek.com/ and ecosia partnership would be genuinely fruitful.
- timeon 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y agoGreat! 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 2y agoQwant 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 2y agoQwant is Bing. I've been comparing a few searches, it gave me about the same results as bing.
- bad_user 2y agoQwant has had its own index too, but it's smaller, probably meant to serve the French market. When they don't have coverage, they fall back to Bing, which in my case is all the time. Therefore, I hope they invest more in their own index and stop being so reliant on Bing.
- matt-p 2y agoI 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 2y agoWhen 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 2y agoI pay for Kagi, and I wouldn't mind paying as much for a European sovereign alternative.
- dismalaf 2y agoVery nice. Due to recent events I'm trying to divest from US tech as much as possible.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoI 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- carlosjobim 2y ago[flagged]
- Vaslo 2y agoAmericans are really not too worried about it.
- dismalaf 2y agoThey 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...
- nickpsecurity 2y agoI'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 2y agohttps://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
- nickpsecurity 2y agoCommon 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.
- ricardo81 2y agoI 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.
- layer8 2y agoIn 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/ https://good-search.org/ [1] https://en.reset.org/the-good-search-engine-web-search-without-advertising-benefits-users-and-the-climate/ https://en.reset.org/the-good-search-engine-web-search-witho...
- guywithahat 2y agoYandex 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.
- fifilura 2y agoEuropeans will not start using a Muscovite search engine. (Edit: R -> Muscovite)
- fakedang 2y agoIs there a difference anyways between Russian and Muscovite? After all, Muscovites imposed their culture forcefully all over Russia as much as they could.
- fifilura 2y agoNot all of Russia. And I think it is a reminder to the people of Dagestan, Buratia, Altai, Bashkortorstan etc that they allow themselves to be taken advantage of and killed by a tribesman from the plains.
- paganel 2y agoThe reactionary spirit among the Western technical elites never ceases to amaze me, it shouldn't by this point, but it still does.
- user876 2y agoIs 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
- crossroadsguy 2y agoI 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 2y agoWhy? 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 2y 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.
- dmje 2y agoI'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 https://kagi.com/stats
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Pooge 2y agoI 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-europe-as-france-and-germany-call-for-decrypt-law/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-e... [2]: https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-of-encryption-the-8-december-case/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275795
- atoav 2y agoThese 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 2y agoThose laws weren't passed. The US Cloud Act and others were.
- pjc50 2y agoUS 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.
- weinzierl 2y agoI'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.
- VSerge 2y agoQwant 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 2y agoI can confirm this. I was already cautious with Qwant because it was, from the very beginning, the worst search engine I've ever seen.
- nunobrito 2y agoThat isn't the case, the engine is quite capable. Have been using for 10 years as replacement for google. Only stopped recently because any AI is now better at answering most technical questions.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHow was it more capable then google?
- nunobrito 2y ago
- 1oooqooq 2y ago[flagged]
- FranzFerdiNaN 2y agoTypical Hacker News comment. Absolutely no clue about what they are talking about, yet making their comment with complete certainty.
- oskarw85 2y ago[flagged]
- 1oooqooq 2y agosuch a well though rebate of my points. can't find a single flaw in your well laid out arguments (German living in spain btw) looked at a mirror recently?
- nottorp 2y agoFrench 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 2y agoI 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?
- nottorp 2y agoI'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.
- prmoustache 2y 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". I read it has limiting the scope so they can fine tune their code/index before going bigger with other languages.
- benrutter 2y 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". How many nazi/right wing parties are you thinking are in charge of funding in European countries? Most governments fall pretty far left of either American party. I also think there are lots of people looking to search in their own language, because that's their language, rather than some kind of right wing tie?
- slevis 2y agoWith 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.
- kome 2y agoguys... you really flagged a comment for saying that yandex is actually a good alternative? seriously?
- immibis 2y agoYes 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.
- kome 2y agoI had NO idea about this feature... thanks!
- benrutter 2y agoExcellent 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.
- moooo99 2y agoUnfortunately 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.
- Fnoord 2y ago(2024) This news is from mid December 2024.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y 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 2y agoThe discussion in this thread shows why despite lots of talent Europe has no build large tech companies.
- maxwellprice265 2y ago[dead]
- heraldgeezer 2y agoSounds 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".