Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index | Hacker News Reader

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

blog.ecosia.org

543 pointsamarcheschi175 comments

I'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.

Yes, be careful with Qwant, use Google or Bing.

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.

I can confirm this. I was already cautious with Qwant because it was, from the very beginning, the worst search engine I've ever seen.

That 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.

How was it more capable then google?

It isn't more capable than Google.

It is certainly more private than Google and capable enough to answer my daily questions. For me it is important to reduce as much as possible the entrapment from google services.

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

Why not try Kagi? Serious question.

Honestly, I do not feel like needing something "more" than what I use right now. I'd say that reddit suffices for (almost) everything I need that I can't find with a simple search on brave search or Google

Reddit comments are mostly bots shilling ideology or products nowadays though. At least that's the impression I get.

It's still okay for specific niches or local communities imho

Kagi allows you to do things like inject CSS to filter out pre-translated Reddit results (although it is on their radar to make this a default setting).

Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:

(technically you could inject it as a userscript but that's a bit more involved on mobile)

  /*
  Hide pre-translated webpages.
  "sri-group" is main result, "__srgi"  are sub results.
  You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
  */
  :is(div.__srgi, div.sri group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
    display: none !important;
  }

Although the main draw is being able to uprank, downrank and block sites in your results. They also do things like deprioritizing and labeling AI in image search, and concatenating listicles ("10 best Android note taking apps") under a single header.

Ok the points you made are cool

Userstyles are always nice, and if an that’s officially endorsed use that sounds sick!

> Although the main draw is being able to uprank, downrank and block sites in your results

I think Brave Search has this too now? Not as straightforward – you can only change site rank when you’re on the search page, and only for the domains currently on that page for some reason – even though the adjustments you’ve made will apply to all searches from now on. Oh, and it also only has uprank and block.

I'm a paying customer for Kagi, and I like it very much, but I don't use Google because it is part of FAMAG. As European, having a functioning European index is worth a lot more than Kagi. Though Kagi themselves also are building their own index, which is great.

Kagi uses Google and Bing so no reason they won't add this new index to the mix, if they can gain access. The more indexes the better!

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.

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.

> Ecosia is a non-profit, so being profitable is not their mission.

So was OpenAI, but people develop amazingly flexible morals when someone throws big $$$ at them. Not saying this will happen to Ecosia, I wish them all the best, but at this point I have zero trust in promises and statements like "we'll never do X".

Again, that's not to say they are unscrupulous, they might have the best intentions of "never doing X", but such promises are extremely difficult to keep if they ever become a huge success.

Are there differences between what non-profits are allowed to do in Germany vs the US?

I'm assuming that German has stricter rules, but I wouldn't know.

It doesn't matter what the law allows unfortunately. If enough money is involved, everything is possible. Law is what people make it, and people can be bought and sold. It's not some fundamental physical constant of the universe.

This is why statements like this feel like empty posturing (even if the intentions are genuine and good).

This is true but Civil law seems to be bit less "flexible" than Common law.

This isn't a civil law vs common law thing.

It's a US vs sensible countries thing.

Then why have laws in the first place? Seriously, that's just self-defeating cynicism.

I haven't looked into Ecosia, but they seem to be a GmbH, a limited liability company in Germany. This allows a lot of wiggle room!

A foundation (that's another legal form in Germany, but note that the name "foundation" itself is not protected.) would probably be a better alternative, but due to the way foundations (the legal form) are designed, they are hard to setup and maintain, i.e. expensive. Anyway, Ecosia is also part of a growing movement for steward-ownership that's promoting a new legal form called "Gesellschaft mit gebundenen Vermögen" (GmgV, Company with bound capital). The German department of justice is involved, and while this does not promise a speedy delivery, there are drafts and it does show attention on the highest level.

Let's cheer those people on than lazily dismiss them.

>Then why have laws in the first place? Seriously, that's just self-defeating cynicism.

I guess that in the spirit of a the previous post, the obvious answer will be something like "having laws is to bind them, the money-less serfs, not to put any hindrance on us the masters and possessors of everything."

I'm not dismissing them at all, but I have become much more cynical about the outcomes of starry eyed promises like this. Again, I have no doubts about their intentions, I have doubts about those intentions staying the same over time. I have doubts about intentions staying just as pure when VC money enters the game.

Let's take a step back here: do you seriously believe that the law applies equally to everyone? That it's unbending and a bullet proof backstop?

My views are definitely more cynical than when I was younger, but this was shaped by decades of witnessing the erosion in the rule of law. It's obvious that there's two kinds of law: one for those with wealth and power and one for those without. And the law is very malleable for the former group - in fact it is usually shaped to benefit them. They only have to straddle the line to avoid making it too obvious. You don't have to go far either: wasn't it in Germany where they weaponized the police and the justice system to harass journalists who exposed the Wirecard scheme?

So no, I'm not going to put much faith in statements like "oh we are legally not allowed to do X", because that just means "we are not likely to do it under the current circumstances". You have to be exceptionally naive to believe that a sufficiently motivated investor would be unable to find a convenient loophole if required.

I guess this is also a cultural difference. In Germany, there are obviously still people who believe that the law is some sort of serious warranty for people to keep their promise. I'm afraid this is again only applicable to those without money and power. I'm sure the German legal system will bear down with it's full might on any small time company or enterprise that breaks the law. I have very serious doubts about them doing this for the big boys. Again, we just need to look at Wirecard...

To reiterate, this is not a judgement on this effort or their motives. It is simply a statement about the current world, where all over the globe we see case after case of unbridled greed and everything eventually being beholden to more money.

So you seem to think the struggle is already forfeit. That's your choice, but, you know, not fighting means you already lost.

But things are not lost. The very example you cite, Wirecard, despite the attempts to silence the Financial Times (of London, BTW. Wirecard "weaponized" the British justice system) in 2019, has been charged by the German regulator BaFin in 2020 and the scandal is slowly but surely worked out. As of today, three top managers have been sentenced in civil processes to pay damages, 2 more cases are currently heard, 21 more are investigated, and 11 have been exonerated. And this is just civil/trade law, criminal law is also prosecuted. Braun is held in custody, the hearings are ongoing. Marsalek is on the run and presumably hiding in Russia. Erffa and Bellenhaus are about to receive their sentences. Steidl and Knoop are about to have their first hearings this year. Those are all C-level managers.

Could this all go faster? It sure would be nice. But this is better than what you seem to think what is happening. Furthermore, this is all orthogonal to Ecosia's pledge.

I'm not talking about the struggle, you seem intent on arguing against a strawman. I'm all for the struggle. What I don't believe in is promises like "we are legally not allowed to do X". People are legally not allowed to drive faster than the speed limit. People are legally not allowed to launder money. People are legally not allowed to murder each other.

In corporate law, what is legally allowed or not allowed is irrelevant at the end of the day. The only thing that is relevant is how much money is one willing to throw at the problem, which just depends on how much money they expect to make from it.

Ecosia is doing great work! I'm happy they are doing it and I'm rooting for them. But I consider it naive to believe that their intentions will stay good purely on the basis that it would be illegal for them to do otherwise. This is a completely meaningless protection or backstop in my view.

Just look at what Musk and Trump are doing in the US. They get away with bald faced market manipulation, front running, pump & dump schemes and God knows what else. Why? Because they are extremely rich and have a lot of power.

This doesn't mean we should stop doing good things. But we should probably stop pretending that the law is some sort of invincible barrier to misbehavior. It lends very little credence to the robustness of the promise.

> This doesn't mean we should stop doing good things. But we should probably stop pretending that the law is some sort of invincible barrier to misbehavior. It lends very little credence to the robustness of the promise.

So we have common ground. I agree, laws by themselves have no power and they are certainly not an invincible barrier to anything! You need people and the will to uphold them. It requires eternal vigilance. And what I'm saying is that there are people and whole societies, in fact, wanting to and, in fact, upholding laws and the rule of law, e.g. Wirecard.

I may be naive, you may be cynic, that doesn't mean we can't pull on the same string. If you agree with me that the rule of law is desirable and that laws are uphold by people, I'd only ask you to not dismiss laws and the rule of law wholesale, just because there are bad actors and it is not perfect. I guess, that's not what you wanted to do anyway, but it came across as such.

---

After looking more into our case of Ecosia I agree, their pledge has little legal binding power so far. As a GmbH they can put out press releases all day and rescind them just as easily. It does not fulfill the specific requirements of an "Auslobung" (a promise to do something), so, yeah, at the moment it's all talk. They may do the walk, but nobody can sue them, if they don't.

A foundation would be different, but also hard to do and not really suited for economic activity, a gGmbH is geared for economic activity in the public interest, which is different again, so they lobby for a new legal form (GmbV) that binds capital as a foundation would but is as easy as a GmbH to set up and run. Like I wrote earlier, there is activity in the legislative to create such a legal form, but Germany being a very thorough representative democracy there are many things to be taken into account and it will take time. Honestly, I'm not really invested in this initiative, so I'll wait and see and wish them all the best.

This blog post briefly explains their legal setup:

https://blog.ecosia.org/trees-not-profits/

They don't just have intentions, they have legal requirements. It's fine to be cynical, but if we just assume that everything is always terrible, there is no incentive to not be terrible.

And how reliable are those legal requirements? One has to be very naive to believe that the law is some sort of ironclad constant of the universe. For someone with money, the law is simply an equation. It can be bypassed, molded or broken - the only balance is the money, the payoff. Did the law stop HSBC from laundering cartel money? Did the law stop Wirecard? When enough money is involved, people just look at it as a risk/reward or cost/payoff.

I'm optimistic about this effort. I have no doubts about their current intentions. But I'm not so naive as to believe that just because something is illegal right now, that this is some sort of bulletproof barrier against shenanigans in the future. So many companies have made promises like this, and so many of them amounted to nothing in the end. I'd simply rather believe them by their word than have to rely on these kinds of paper thin guarantees.

> 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

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.

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.)

Léandri left Qwant 5 years ago though, and most of their plans for mail, maps, etc have been abandoned.

The new owner is Octave Klaba (from OVH).

The history of Qwant itself should be a big red-flag.

At this point, why keeping the brand?

They have no real IP of interest and they are only associated with bad things... for the few people that knows them.

The only thing that is stable in its history, is the public funds put in there...

Now I assume that it's the only reason for Qwant to exist: to get public funding and do everything but an actual European search engine/index.

Also, Octave is quite successful on his hardware/network ventures, it's the complete opposite for the software/service part. OVH would be much more popular if they knew how to make software, which is a decent Manager. Hubic is another disaster from Roubaix.

So this partnership is pretty meaningless for us I'm afraid.

I've been using Qwant, people have to be paid and there was never silence about the difficulties that qwant had. In fact, it would be odd if they would be hiring people and not really clear how they are being paid.

I'm happy for them on this partnership.

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.

>>Axel Springer-Verlag (Publisher) is nothing to be toying around with

The real question is:

Is Elliot Carver (from James Bond -> Tomorrow Never Dies) based on Mathias Döpfner or Rupert Murdoch?

In the spirit of international cooperation: ¿Por qué no los dos?

Would you say they are comparable to Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black then?

> They own the news from the entire range of lower working class up to the upper middle class

With a 10% market share? Come on.

Considering how German government is persecuting people for being pro-Palestine, I wouldn't want to share one bit of data with German entities.

In 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/

[1] https://en.reset.org/the-good-search-engine-web-search-witho...

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.

Europeans will not start using a Muscovite search engine.

(Edit: R -> Muscovite)

Is there a difference anyways between Russian and Muscovite? After all, Muscovites imposed their culture forcefully all over Russia as much as they could.

Not 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.

The reactionary spirit among the Western technical elites never ceases to amaze me, it shouldn't by this point, but it still does.

You may be right? It was written in anger.

It takes a lot to admit one's missteps! Appreciate the gesture, as an innocent byreader

It still seems very moderate compared to the fascist imperialist spirit amongst the elite (and majority of the overall population) of that other country..

This is precisely why I lost all respect for the West in the last couple of years and am now cheering on Putin's propaganda that is deepening divisions in your own societies. It's obvious you'd like nothing more than to carve up our country and destroy our culture — which the people of Siberia, Caucasus, and all other regions have significantly contributed to. But you know fuck all about that because your knowledge of Russia is based on news headlines.

Now I really hope he's successful, so this will come back at you.

You held respect previously and this is what caused you to lose it? Or you never held respect and use whatever to feed you?

Didn't Yandex RU divest and its now EU owned in Europe? could be a thin shell of course.

No. Original owner of Yandex (Arkady Volozh) sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors (approved by the government) and left with small number of assets in a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebius_Group Everything else that people usually associate with Yandex (search, mail, taxi, marketplace etc.) remains under Russian ownership.

Thanks for the correction.

Kagi is using it for image search and a lot of people do use Kagi

I do hope you realise that there’s subjective and then there’s “‘a lot’ of people use Kagi” subjective :)

That I do. I should have writen that after my morning coffee.

Based on what's being commented here - some absolutely will. And sitting on the eastern border of EU, that truly scares me.

I don’t think anyone in their right mind is advocating severing ties with the USA to get closer to Russia.

That means I’m nuts, or what? The OP was right, Yandex is way better compared to Google when searching for politically sensitive stuff, and they don’t seem to have that much of recency bias as the Google search index has, which I found to be a good thing, but on the whole Google’s search is still slightly better, I would say. More convenient, at least, thanks to the deep integration within Chrome.

Bingo ! Anything considered too politically sensitive in the west (you know what I'm talking about) can easily be researched on Yandex.

Wanna find dirt about the west ? Use Yandex. Wanna find dirt about the kremlin ? Use Google/Bing/Whatever.

> you know what I'm talking about

Can you be more specific?

(I’m not the guy you replied to) but Google has like 8 ad-friendly approved sources you may get news from, which are all anti-Trump sources. It can be impossible to find news stories unfavorable to democrats without appending the name of conservative outlets on the end.

> Anything considered too politically sensitive in the west (you know what I'm talking about)

Actually I don't. Can you give an example of something censored by Google in the west the same way Russia openly censors it's anti-war voices domestically?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/yandex-warns-russian-user...

https://dfrlab.org/2022/03/31/yandex-suppresses-ukraine-war-...

Can you give an example of what “politically sensitive stuff” means here? Without context it contains multitudes…

Using Yandex is the sanest option for me, too, as it feels more like 2014 Google than any other search engine. i.e. I've found it will turn up old blogs, dodgy forums, torrents, which are buried or censored on American search engines.

I'm in the UK, and don't really care that Yandex is Russian. I don't like their politics, I don't like Google's politics either. Yandex just gives me the results I want rather than obscuring them.

https://images.app.goo.gl/TACTypB6AnUtAgku6

(Funnily, this comic was nigh impossible to find on Google, but turned up on the first search attempt on Yandex)

A lot of people whoa re boycotting some American goods are quite likely to buy Chinese instead so why not?

Also, in terms of privacy Russia and the Western countries will not cooperate - so Yandex or the Russian authorities will not be able to get much information on us, nor will anyone in the West get as much information from Yandex as they would from a Western search engine.

Part of the reason Europeans want to shun the USA is that it is sidling up with Russia.

True. Personally I have thought a change like this inevitable for a long time. The big threat to the US is China. Russia may even be potential ally against China in the long term and is no real threat to the US.

Russia is something of a threat to Europe (especially Eastern Europe), but China is a lot less of a threat to us than it is to the US.

In many ways European countries are sliding slowly into a closer relationship with China. In the UK (where the Russian threat is pretty distant) the government is allowing Chinese influence in universities, politics and business (universities that are transparently apologists for China), despite many warnings and spy/bought influence scandals. It seems to be even worse in other European countries.

I think the future holds an American lead alliance to counter China. It will contain multiple Asian countries, but I would not bet on which way European countries will go (and even whether they all pick the same side).

I certainly will, thanks for the plug.

yandex is very very good. i wonder why is not used more.

There are certainly some areas where it's not as strong, and I find the anti-bot filter is exceptionally aggressive. That said it does feel like one of the best alternatives. Google has gotten so aggressive about pushing ads or ad-friendly sources it can be impossible to find the content I'm looking for

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?

Hi, our 2€/month is indeed a low-entry. About 20% of our users pay voluntarily more to support our mission. As a social enterprise, we do not want to make profits on the subscription, but rather keep it low-cost or support our mission. In the end, it's a mixed calculation, which largely depends on how many searches an average users does (we assume around 80). By the way, Kagi has not built an own index; their model is pretty close to ours.

Hi Andreas, the Firefox 'start install' link is broken ("Hoppla! Wir können diese Seite nicht finden.")

https://good-search.org/about/en/set-up-good/

Also, while I have your attention, something that I would miss from DDG are the bang commands, which make DDG much better than Google, for me personally. Does GOOD have something similar?

Personally, I have replaced most of the DDG bangs with firefox keyword searches. As long as your target site accepts the search string as part of the url, you can achieve the same thing without any search engine redirect.

As an example, my python search bookmark:

  url: https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=%s
  keyword: py

Means that I can type ctrl-L py and it does the same thing that ctrl-K !py used to do.

Yes but surely you don't want to recreate (and maintain!) this whole list by hand? https://duckduckgo.com/bangs#:~:text=13%2C568%20bangs%20and%...

I hear you about the search engine redirect, though

In practice you don’t use that many, and also for most of what I use I’d have to create additional custom “bangs” anyway. For me it’s a browser-level feature (this has been present in browsers from very early on), independent of which search engine I use. And unless a search prefix actually maps to a search engine search, the search engine service has no business of knowing what I query. Better keep it separate.

That's true, but I don't use all 13,000 bangs. It would be impossible for me to remember that many anyway. I should have said "the bangs that I actively use" instead of most of them.

Looks like I have 32 keywords bookmarked like that, around 20 of which I use regularly. The search url's are quite stable, I don't remember ever having to update one. But I'm sure it will happen occasionally.

The Firefox extension link should now work :-). With regard to the bang commands, I think it's on our tech agenda, but would need to check ...

Seems like they partly do use their own index https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

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

Excellent 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.

Excellent! -- despite being overdue.

I hope these Europe-based joint ventures increase in every aspect.

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 agree. Unfortunate because a https://www.mojeek.com/ and ecosia partnership would be genuinely fruitful.

> exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.

Well this is the old article (maybe not 6 but few months).

> 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

> 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.

I 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.

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?

> "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.

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

In fact, Kagi benefits enormously from being small enough that no one is SEOing for them. Google's adversarial game of algorithmic whack-a-mole is very expensive and hard to keep up. Kagi doesn't have to play the game because they're not a target.

That’s a great argument for decentralization of search engine usage. The more small players with different ranking algorithms we have, the harder it is for SEO to work.

> 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.

Yes, this is what constitutes between 99% and 100% of the world economy.

Sure. But what seems to always be attached to anyone doing anything in search is the "Google Killer" expectation...

I 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-e...

[2]: https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275795

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.

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.

Like when they used the Covid app location data to investigate a murder?[1]

[1]: https://metro.co.uk/2022/01/12/german-police-tracked-down-re...

& the US system routes abuses through the private sector: https://www.techpolicy.press/the-us-government-buys-data-for...

These things aren't a one-and-done matter of legislation or constitutions, they rely on constant pressure on every case.

(and I explicitly said the EU system does not guarantee privacy against law enforcement! Because total privacy for crime is very unpopular and politically unsustainable)

Have you never heard of snowden?

I do. I even have his book. What about him?

The subtitle of that article is:

German police are being investigated for using Covid-tracking data as part of a probe into a death.

The fact being that they (illegally) got access to data that was to be used for health purposes.

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

It's a good point, but I'm not going to trust a country where the executive branch used data that was supposed to be used for health purposes for criminal investigations (Germany).

The executive branch of the other one arrested someone for using encryption tools and "protecting [himself] against the exploitation of [his] personal data by GAFAM".

Is 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

I pay for Kagi, and I wouldn't mind paying as much for a European sovereign alternative.

Great!

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.

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.

Qwant is Bing. I've been comparing a few searches, it gave me about the same results as bing.

Qwant 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.

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).

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'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.

https://commoncrawl.org/

Common 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.

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.

So you can't block search engines other than your favorite - that's a positive. If you want to block one you have to block them all.

Recency is not a problem any more than it's a problem for one individual search crawler

> - Content recency. The data sizes can get quite huge, and certain pages require updates more often than others

I have always imagined that having an open crawl corpus aligns closely with the goals of the Internet Archive, where one could already strictly speaking submit updates to with second-level precision based on their URL slugs. The bad news is that with any such common corpus it would actually worsen their bandwidth bill since I would highly suspect that a corpus would be read from much more than it would ingest (e.g. snap https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318384 once but then every downstream corpus consumer would read from IA n times)

While typing this out, I actually wonder if the big search players don't maintain "page diffs" in their index such that loading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43311573 an hour ago and then loading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43311573 now stores only the new content

> so who gets to decide (one user of the index may be interested in a different set of pages vs another)

Surely that's a solved problem in that a common corpus would ingest updates to all frontier pages that it knows about, and exponentially back-off as it finds less and less updates. I don't think the CommonCrawl.org cited by the sibling comment is selective about updates, and unquestionably IA does not: they accept snapshot requests from anyone for what I presume is any URL

>a solved problem

I believe it's not just an issue of detecting actual changes in content, but that there are pages that change very quickly and there can be many of them. e.g. social media posts/comments, reddit, news pages. 'Hit them all very often' would be an answer.

How much a document has changed I think is fairly well-solved and there's working solutions (but there's a semi-related issue regarding who the original author of multiple copies is)

A similar issue is near identical content and canonical URL issues e.g. who gets to decide whether a page gets indexed or not due to similarity with another document, what URLs are indexed and crawled etc. People may have different interpretations of this.

There's other issues for crawling e.g. Facebook and other major sites that have a whitelist approach, presuming any such crawler would respect robots.txt and use a readily identifiable user agent.

"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".

Sounds 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".

The discussion in this thread shows why despite lots of talent Europe has no build large tech companies.

Very nice.

Due to recent events I'm trying to divest from US tech as much as possible.

I 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.

Americans are really not too worried about it.

They 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...

With 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.

Unfortunately 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.

Why are you dissapointed in Ecosia for Qwant getting investment from Springer?

Im disappointed they still partnered up despite the investment from Springer

(2024)

This news is from mid December 2024.

guys... you really flagged a comment for saying that yandex is actually a good alternative? seriously?

Yes 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.

I had NO idea about this feature... thanks!

French 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.

I 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?

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".

> 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.

> 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.

> 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?

I switched to Qwant 2 months ago after using DuckDuckGo for 4 years and Google before that. I live in Poland - and Qwant gives me the best search results of them all. Much more relevant than DuckDuckGo and much less sponsored content than Google. I'm really happy about how it works for me.

I read that as a starting point.

Lots of people in French and german speaking countries do search in their respective language, as do spanish and chinese speaking people.

I don't see it as separating the eu internet accross language. I bet Google/Bing and any search engine has a language metadata in its index anyway and I don't understand your link with nazi parties.

All 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.

I am so ready for it.

You realize that an index is still necessary for RAG?

Where do you think the results used by Perplexity, Open AI etc. come from?

There 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_%....

Yes, 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.

This 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.

All the apps use the norwegian service anyway

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