7 ms·

Our European search index goes live

230 points by maelito 1y ago

1317 1y ago
(only in France)
- usr1106 1y ago
  and even there only a small part. Goal for EOY is 50%.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - aziaziazi 1y ago
    more precisely: > We’re aiming to serve 50% of French search queries by the end of the year, and will soon start rolling out to other countries.
homarp 1y ago
related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811879 Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
scotty79 1y ago
How do you even build a search index today when websites barely link to each other? Nowadays the bulk of linking goes to ecommerce sites (amazon) from content farms (reddit) and all those sites are submitted directly to Google. I don't think crawlable internet exists anymore.
- gostsamo 1y ago
  You are making a broad generalization and even it is based on the assumption that the page-ranking algorithm is the only possible way to do it.
  - scotty79 1y ago
    I make no assumption beyond the one that if you want to index a page you need to know its address and if the author of the website is not going to give it to you because you are not Google and no known website links to it, then you have no way of finding it out. You can't build anything independently. You have to go to Google.
- loa_in_ 1y ago
  It isn't impossible nowadays to enumerate domain names using DNS data and score them based on the content they serve. Isn't that what we really want as users? Scoring based not on proxies for relevance like referral count, but on viewable content?
  - guillem_lefait 1y ago
    It's possible indeed as I'm doing it for another reason (monitoring sovereigty). You can ask Icann [0] access to gTld domain list files (if you have a legitimate reason to do so). Once access you are granted access to a gTld, you can download a compressed csv file with a line per couple <domain, nameserver>. [0] https://czds.icann.org/home https://czds.icann.org/home
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  > How do you even build a search index today You can start with seeds like common crawl, and go from there. You can also get DNS records from various providers. Then there's SSL cert logs that you can crawl. Plenty of sources, if you have funding (search by itself without ads sponsoring it might be a net loss, except some niche uses like kagi?)
user32489318 1y ago
It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
- simonask 1y ago
  US solutions are incredibly self-centered. It's very visible to Europeans how American cultural norms completely dominate the digital public sphere. In 2025, this feels dangerous to many of us. Examples of American cultural attitudes permeating social media platforms that have felt very odd in Europe: Firearms and violence (which is apparently allowed), and nudity (which is apparently always sexual). The concerns about the current direction of EU regulation are valid and huge, I get that.
  - dijit 1y ago
    What's more surprising to me (also EU citizen) is how readily able we are to adopt US cultural norms to our own. The most glaring and obvious example is the narrative surrounding race/gender relations. The EU has it's own racial issues but we get BLM riots too and we get chest thumping misandrists in Sweden.. the country that has done the most to promote gender equality of any nation on the planet. BLM riots don't make sense in the UK for example, our race relations are much more nuanced, difficult, and probably put the Pakistani community in the most visibly disadvantaged position; but there's no space to talk about that as we're discussing George Floyd and police brutality (which, largely is not a UK issue at all). I know for Americans this might come off as tone deaf because everything over there is so polarised it's like a battle to the death; but I think a major reason the right wing is growing in the EU is because of US cultural norms becoming prevalent (individualism over collectivism) and that naturally comes with some amount of xenophobia; as if you're living an individualistic mindset you naturally see resources as zero-sum. The growth of right-wing movements thrive, ironically, by positioning themselves as a bulwark against what they frame as foreign cultural encroachment. It seems we're stuck trying to choose between a censored European world or an American one that doesn't fit us at all. But if I have to choose, I choose the one that actually sort of fits.
trilogic 1y ago
Great job, already start using it and looking good. Crawl the f..k out of internet same way all the big techs are doing, at least what´s European stays in EU. The ethics should apply to all equally. Thank you and Viva la France.
mrweasel 1y ago
That was remarkably fast, even if it only covers a subset of French searches. I love Ecosia, but I half expected this to be more an PR announcement when it was first presented, not that they'd actually deliver anything, and certainly not so fast. Did Qwants already work on an index?
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Qwant has been building and using its own index, augmented by buying search results from Bing when its index falls short.
tkot 1y ago
If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Search engines should be run as utilities. Unfortunately we are now in the stage where utilities (and other must haves such as education) are run as private enterprises.
  - victorbjorklund 1y ago
    of food sector. I guess food is more important for survival than education.
    - tremon 1y ago
      Food production doesn't have the same dynamics as search does. There is little value in thousands of small search farmers each indexing their own acre of the Internet space. That's why it should be run as a utility, it's not about importance.
      - victorbjorklund 1y ago
        Few utilities have the exact dynamics of search. Like railroad, water, etc
    - martin-t 1y ago
      How soon are effects visible? Complete lack of food - days, chronic malnutrition - months or years. Lack of education - decades. Many people are not smart enough to think that far ahead. Lack of education is also generally desirable to many people in power. Not just politicians who can more easily lie but also managers and execs. If the tax system is beyond most people's understanding, rich people are not gonna get taxed properly. If people can't do the math on how much value their work produces for a company, they are not gonna understand how big a chunk the people above them in hierarchical structures (like most companies) take out of it.
abc123abc123 1y ago
[flagged]
weinzierl 1y ago
"search index aimed to support a sovereign, privacy-first search infrastructure for Europe" We will see which kind of data privacy they will go for this time. - The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user - The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to European companies.
- weinzierl 1y ago
  For more context: Qwant has taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment. At least on the outset Ecosia seemed to resist to be drawn into traditional media and their interests quite well until now, but them working together with Qwant is not a good sign. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318151
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Daunk 1y ago
Every time I link someone Ecosia, they always complain that it doesn't have a "clean start page", and I do agree. That, and not having the ability to see less or more of certain pages is why no one I know uses Ecosia.
- Krasnol 1y ago
  This was actually my first thought too when I got to the page. It doesn't look like your usual search page and I had the feeling I'm not on the main page at all. I'll still try it as my new default FF search engine since google got really bad in the past months.
- WA 1y ago
  I don’t use Ecosia, because their marketing messages always have been somewhat deceitful. They claimed "plant tree with your searches", but in reality, if you didn’t click on ads, nothing gets planted.
jasonvorhe 1y ago
> Because it strengthens Europe’s long-term competitiveness, democratic control, and stability. I don't see the point. What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish? The chat control plans, the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Digital Services Act, the militarization - none of it seems to be democratic tied to any values surrounding freedom.
- alecsm 1y ago
  You have a point but he does too. Without you own search engines (or tech companies in general) you depend on third parties and become basically a puppet.
- Angostura 1y ago
  It may be imperfect, but having a system controlled by someone you vote for and can ultimately kick out is better than having a system controlled by another country's political apparatus.
  - perihelions 1y ago
    I disagree. It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country, then a censored/corrupted service controlled by their own country's government. The former meets the user's requirements, today; the "democracy can fix it!" one is an unrealized promise of the future. If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
    - Wilder7977 1y ago
      Kagi user here, but one could argue that there is no such thing as un-backdoored service when the US government can knock at Google's door (kagi uses GCP) and ask the data, with little to no accountability or due process. So I agree with you, but the premises are quite restrictive.
m00dy 1y ago
[flagged]
- diggan 1y ago
  > who's using search engines these days If nothing else, how do you think various LLMs using tools are doing their web searching? Besides, plenty of people resort to traditional searches for various reasons, often because LLMs aren't happy to talk about any topic, while search engines usually lets you search for pretty much whatever you want.
- mftrhu 1y ago
  People who do not want to read and trust the slop that whatever LLM du jour is regurgitating after calling out to said search engines. Humans are already unfortunately prone to bullshitting and bloviating, but they are also used to dealing with other humans: there's no need to add an additional layer of both from a black box which does not behave like one.
CommenterPerson 1y ago
Here is the actual search page. I searched for something, looks pretty good. One small blow against enshittification: https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/
- jsnell 1y ago
  How do you know those good-looking results were served from the new index, rather than being just rebranded Bing API results?
  - CommenterPerson 1y ago
    First, the results seem really good. Definitely better than Bing. Remember the old days when g**gle came out and it seemed amazing? A little like that. Second, I read their blog. Critical thinking and reading helps one recognize BS. Now the question is typically HN with no answer "proof". One can dive down a HN sub bullet tree with this. It's something like proving you exist. Nothing definitive there!
    - jsnell 1y ago
      The reason I'm asking this is exactly their blog post, which says says that their goal is to roll this out to 50% of the French queries at the end of the year. That's a rather limited slice of traffic (50% of French queries, 0% of everything else), and it's not described as the current state but their goal for the end of the year. The obvious implication is that right now even their French rollout is lower than 50%. How much lower, we don't know for certain, but 5 months is a long time. I have to imagine it is far lower than 50% right now. 1%? 10%? Hard to believe it is any higher than that. So I think my original question was very fair. The answer could for example have been that they indicated on the results page, or maybe they had some kind of a per-user opt-in toggle that you switched. From your reply, I gather that's not the case, and you're just assuming that your results must be from the new index. That seems like a bad assumption to make.
bl0rg 1y ago
I've tested it and it's actually quite good. I'll be switching.
- CommenterPerson 1y ago
  Totally agree. It doesn't seem limited to EU results btw. I added a bookmark on the toolbar and will be searching there first. Enough already will surveillance capitalism! https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/
linotype 1y ago
If these take off and Europe builds its own web, can we please take off the cookie banners from the rest of the web?
- jraph 1y ago
  Taking off the tracking cookies would allow taking off the cookie banners today. Cookies banners are also not the only way to deal with GDPR, they are just an anti-pattern to make people hate GDPR and trick them into giving consent when they don't consent.
waltercool 1y ago
[dead]
hoppp 1y ago
Ecosia seems to be returning mostly sponsored hits and its hard to find things with it. I will always prefer duckduckgo

230 points by maelito 1y ago

1317 1y ago

(only in France)

usr1106 1y ago
and even there only a small part. Goal for EOY is 50%.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- aziaziazi 1y ago
  more precisely: > We’re aiming to serve 50% of French search queries by the end of the year, and will soon start rolling out to other countries.

homarp 1y ago

related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811879 Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

scotty79 1y ago

How do you even build a search index today when websites barely link to each other? Nowadays the bulk of linking goes to ecommerce sites (amazon) from content farms (reddit) and all those sites are submitted directly to Google. I don't think crawlable internet exists anymore.

gostsamo 1y ago
You are making a broad generalization and even it is based on the assumption that the page-ranking algorithm is the only possible way to do it.
- scotty79 1y ago
  I make no assumption beyond the one that if you want to index a page you need to know its address and if the author of the website is not going to give it to you because you are not Google and no known website links to it, then you have no way of finding it out. You can't build anything independently. You have to go to Google.
loa_in_ 1y ago
It isn't impossible nowadays to enumerate domain names using DNS data and score them based on the content they serve. Isn't that what we really want as users? Scoring based not on proxies for relevance like referral count, but on viewable content?
- guillem_lefait 1y ago
  It's possible indeed as I'm doing it for another reason (monitoring sovereigty). You can ask Icann [0] access to gTld domain list files (if you have a legitimate reason to do so). Once access you are granted access to a gTld, you can download a compressed csv file with a line per couple <domain, nameserver>. [0] https://czds.icann.org/home https://czds.icann.org/home
NitpickLawyer 1y ago
> How do you even build a search index today You can start with seeds like common crawl, and go from there. You can also get DNS records from various providers. Then there's SSL cert logs that you can crawl. Plenty of sources, if you have funding (search by itself without ads sponsoring it might be a net loss, except some niche uses like kagi?)

user32489318 1y ago

It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors

simonask 1y ago
US solutions are incredibly self-centered. It's very visible to Europeans how American cultural norms completely dominate the digital public sphere. In 2025, this feels dangerous to many of us. Examples of American cultural attitudes permeating social media platforms that have felt very odd in Europe: Firearms and violence (which is apparently allowed), and nudity (which is apparently always sexual). The concerns about the current direction of EU regulation are valid and huge, I get that.
- dijit 1y ago
  What's more surprising to me (also EU citizen) is how readily able we are to adopt US cultural norms to our own. The most glaring and obvious example is the narrative surrounding race/gender relations. The EU has it's own racial issues but we get BLM riots too and we get chest thumping misandrists in Sweden.. the country that has done the most to promote gender equality of any nation on the planet. BLM riots don't make sense in the UK for example, our race relations are much more nuanced, difficult, and probably put the Pakistani community in the most visibly disadvantaged position; but there's no space to talk about that as we're discussing George Floyd and police brutality (which, largely is not a UK issue at all). I know for Americans this might come off as tone deaf because everything over there is so polarised it's like a battle to the death; but I think a major reason the right wing is growing in the EU is because of US cultural norms becoming prevalent (individualism over collectivism) and that naturally comes with some amount of xenophobia; as if you're living an individualistic mindset you naturally see resources as zero-sum. The growth of right-wing movements thrive, ironically, by positioning themselves as a bulwark against what they frame as foreign cultural encroachment. It seems we're stuck trying to choose between a censored European world or an American one that doesn't fit us at all. But if I have to choose, I choose the one that actually sort of fits.

trilogic 1y ago

Great job, already start using it and looking good. Crawl the f..k out of internet same way all the big techs are doing, at least what´s European stays in EU. The ethics should apply to all equally. Thank you and Viva la France.

mrweasel 1y ago

That was remarkably fast, even if it only covers a subset of French searches. I love Ecosia, but I half expected this to be more an PR announcement when it was first presented, not that they'd actually deliver anything, and certainly not so fast. Did Qwants already work on an index?

jeroenhd 1y ago
Qwant has been building and using its own index, augmented by buying search results from Bing when its index falls short.

tkot 1y ago

If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?

jacquesm 1y ago
Search engines should be run as utilities. Unfortunately we are now in the stage where utilities (and other must haves such as education) are run as private enterprises.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  of food sector. I guess food is more important for survival than education.
  - tremon 1y ago
    Food production doesn't have the same dynamics as search does. There is little value in thousands of small search farmers each indexing their own acre of the Internet space. That's why it should be run as a utility, it's not about importance.
    - victorbjorklund 1y ago
      Few utilities have the exact dynamics of search. Like railroad, water, etc
  - martin-t 1y ago
    How soon are effects visible? Complete lack of food - days, chronic malnutrition - months or years. Lack of education - decades. Many people are not smart enough to think that far ahead. Lack of education is also generally desirable to many people in power. Not just politicians who can more easily lie but also managers and execs. If the tax system is beyond most people's understanding, rich people are not gonna get taxed properly. If people can't do the math on how much value their work produces for a company, they are not gonna understand how big a chunk the people above them in hierarchical structures (like most companies) take out of it.

abc123abc123 1y ago

[flagged]

weinzierl 1y ago

"search index aimed to support a sovereign, privacy-first search infrastructure for Europe" We will see which kind of data privacy they will go for this time. - The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user - The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to European companies.

weinzierl 1y ago
For more context: Qwant has taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment. At least on the outset Ecosia seemed to resist to be drawn into traditional media and their interests quite well until now, but them working together with Qwant is not a good sign. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318151

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Daunk 1y ago

Every time I link someone Ecosia, they always complain that it doesn't have a "clean start page", and I do agree. That, and not having the ability to see less or more of certain pages is why no one I know uses Ecosia.

Krasnol 1y ago
This was actually my first thought too when I got to the page. It doesn't look like your usual search page and I had the feeling I'm not on the main page at all. I'll still try it as my new default FF search engine since google got really bad in the past months.
WA 1y ago
I don’t use Ecosia, because their marketing messages always have been somewhat deceitful. They claimed "plant tree with your searches", but in reality, if you didn’t click on ads, nothing gets planted.

jasonvorhe 1y ago

> Because it strengthens Europe’s long-term competitiveness, democratic control, and stability. I don't see the point. What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish? The chat control plans, the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Digital Services Act, the militarization - none of it seems to be democratic tied to any values surrounding freedom.

alecsm 1y ago
You have a point but he does too. Without you own search engines (or tech companies in general) you depend on third parties and become basically a puppet.
Angostura 1y ago
It may be imperfect, but having a system controlled by someone you vote for and can ultimately kick out is better than having a system controlled by another country's political apparatus.
- perihelions 1y ago
  I disagree. It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country, then a censored/corrupted service controlled by their own country's government. The former meets the user's requirements, today; the "democracy can fix it!" one is an unrealized promise of the future. If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
  - Wilder7977 1y ago
    Kagi user here, but one could argue that there is no such thing as un-backdoored service when the US government can knock at Google's door (kagi uses GCP) and ask the data, with little to no accountability or due process. So I agree with you, but the premises are quite restrictive.

m00dy 1y ago

[flagged]

diggan 1y ago
> who's using search engines these days If nothing else, how do you think various LLMs using tools are doing their web searching? Besides, plenty of people resort to traditional searches for various reasons, often because LLMs aren't happy to talk about any topic, while search engines usually lets you search for pretty much whatever you want.
mftrhu 1y ago
People who do not want to read and trust the slop that whatever LLM du jour is regurgitating after calling out to said search engines. Humans are already unfortunately prone to bullshitting and bloviating, but they are also used to dealing with other humans: there's no need to add an additional layer of both from a black box which does not behave like one.

CommenterPerson 1y ago

Here is the actual search page. I searched for something, looks pretty good. One small blow against enshittification: https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/

jsnell 1y ago
How do you know those good-looking results were served from the new index, rather than being just rebranded Bing API results?
- CommenterPerson 1y ago
  First, the results seem really good. Definitely better than Bing. Remember the old days when g**gle came out and it seemed amazing? A little like that. Second, I read their blog. Critical thinking and reading helps one recognize BS. Now the question is typically HN with no answer "proof". One can dive down a HN sub bullet tree with this. It's something like proving you exist. Nothing definitive there!
  - jsnell 1y ago
    The reason I'm asking this is exactly their blog post, which says says that their goal is to roll this out to 50% of the French queries at the end of the year. That's a rather limited slice of traffic (50% of French queries, 0% of everything else), and it's not described as the current state but their goal for the end of the year. The obvious implication is that right now even their French rollout is lower than 50%. How much lower, we don't know for certain, but 5 months is a long time. I have to imagine it is far lower than 50% right now. 1%? 10%? Hard to believe it is any higher than that. So I think my original question was very fair. The answer could for example have been that they indicated on the results page, or maybe they had some kind of a per-user opt-in toggle that you switched. From your reply, I gather that's not the case, and you're just assuming that your results must be from the new index. That seems like a bad assumption to make.

bl0rg 1y ago

I've tested it and it's actually quite good. I'll be switching.

CommenterPerson 1y ago
Totally agree. It doesn't seem limited to EU results btw. I added a bookmark on the toolbar and will be searching there first. Enough already will surveillance capitalism! https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/

linotype 1y ago

If these take off and Europe builds its own web, can we please take off the cookie banners from the rest of the web?

jraph 1y ago
Taking off the tracking cookies would allow taking off the cookie banners today. Cookies banners are also not the only way to deal with GDPR, they are just an anti-pattern to make people hate GDPR and trick them into giving consent when they don't consent.

waltercool 1y ago

[dead]

hoppp 1y ago

Ecosia seems to be returning mostly sponsored hits and its hard to find things with it. I will always prefer duckduckgo