EU Search engine incoming: Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index
For the people who have not yet decided on a search engine. The most EU way you can go is Ecosia or Qwant as they are building their own search index.
Ecosia is my personal pick as its also aimed at planting trees and they have quite a good browser alongside it.
So many people are happy here. I can understand why but quick reminder that Qwant is not privacy friendly like they claim to be and that the CEO is a bastard who threatened employees.
As for Ecosia, the only green they have is their name. Great they plant trees but they pushed AI so it's basically like if they are destroying the trees they planted.
There is a search engine with their own index from UK, privacy-friendly, it is called Mojeek. It is not as good as the others but I've been using it for maybe 4 months and it already improved a lot. They need users to give feedback and improve. Give it a try ! 😊
Niiice!
I used Qwant for a month, and the pointless sidebar fucks with keyboard navigation. Having to grab my mouse every time I search is a pain, so I ended up with Startpage instead which I am happy with. Hopefully Startpage will get in on this cooperation as well.
Enamoured with Qwant. Great plugins for iOS/Mac too
We will develop a privacy-first search index, which will be used by both Ecosia and Qwant, and unlike proprietary solutions, we are making the index available to others.
Good news, needs to happen as fast as possible.
France and Germany will have it this year, we'll have to see how it evolves further but hopefully its a success!
Sounds great! I've been happy with Ecosia currently. I tried Qwant, but I have strict privacy settings enabled in my browser and it says it couldn't get a secure connection. I'm sure it's 100% safe, but I just settled for Ecosia for now. Looking forward to trying out their new partnered search engine.
It doesn't mention whether it'll be opensource or not. A proprietary search index that isn't USAian is probably better, but still opensource would be better.
Don't let perfect stand in the way of better I'd say, in the end both companies still need to make a return on investment
True, it's a first step in the right direction :)
Maybe I'll use Ecosia again
It better work without JavaScript or cookies.
No clue tbh, do let me know if you try it out!
Now if only anyone of them would offer a paid ad-free option. I'd drop Kagi in an instant
Perhaps send their support an email about it to see what they say
Pity they aren't on mastodon :/
I use Kagi because of their strong stance against censorship. If I want to find information about controversial topics, I expect my search engine to give me the results it has crawled. I use this community test list to determine if they're censoring results. Most search engines fail this now. I imagine any EU search engine will fail this on day one.
@JasSmith @madjo Lemme guess... 'Cause 'Murica is the only country that knows freedom?
If things like that are censored it usually happens on the ISP level, not at the search engine. Those "censored" pages might rank lower but there could be dozens of perfectly fine explanations for that. Mostly because some of those pages know diddly squat about SEO or their pages might be socially relevant but are really bad at / for driving ad revenue.
But calling that "censorship" is IMHO not correct.
Great! Ecosia works super well, and it feels good to not having to rely on google to find things. Only thing I’d wish for is that they’d have some map service or similar to find restaurants and shop. There is sadly no good replacement for google maps that I’ve found
i mean you kinda need to specify what you want from a map, there are a bunch of things that google maps is actively the worst at
For sure, one specific thing is being able to find a restaurant in the vicinity, seeing some kind of review system of its reception, and knowing if it’s open or not and having a link to a menu or its homepage. Another (albeit extremely specific) case is looking up a secondhand store in the vicinity of where I am - I tried this with here wego when I was out recently but it showed me a store that no longer existed. Of course might be a unlucky coincidence (google maps for sure has nonexisting stores too), but I’m 0 for 1 atm.
Organic Maps
You could also use open street maps. For mobile I recommend using Organic Maps.l Only problem is, that the search isn't that good.
Its already been mentioned but if you don't need reviews you can use Here WeGo maps. Its a good alternative and with more users (who make fixes if something is missing) it'll get better and better
Ecosia works well enough for me too. The tree planting thing should never be forgotten. The scope of their work is impressive and they're very transparent about their goals and funding. No other search engine comes close to that.
Try Here WeGo maps, it's the closest one to Google maps but European
This is the way! Excited to try it!
Both are great! In my experience Qwant gives better search results, so thats what i use. I even prefer Qwant's results over Google's. But Ecosia is a great option as well because of the tree planting.
I use Ecosia for personal use and Qwant for work. So I support both!
Ecosia is my personal choice because of the tree planting as well. But I agree Qwant results are a bit better, which for me only matters while I work.
Is either one worth the switch from duckduckgo?
Yes it is.
I personally never really liked duckduckgo. I'd say Qwant is the better one of the two in terms of results (I use it for work) but for personal use I choose Ecosia for the environmental impact, the results are getting better but not on Qwants level yet
Any News on when this will go live?
1H 2025 in France and Germany
1H for Qwant and its indexing of French websites. 2H for Exosia and its indexing of German websites.
The index is expected to start serving France-based search engine traffic for Ecosia and Qwant by the first quarter of next year. It will then expand to include a “significant portion” of traffic in Germany by the end of 2025. English would be the third language they’d look to add, the pair said, adding that more European languages could follow in the future if momentum builds.
Was using startpage the entire time but because of this i'll try out qwant.
Startpage is also majorly American owned, so good to step away from it!
Good thing I recently changed my standard search engine to Wcosia!
Honestly, I don't have a lot of hope for this because Qwant is involved, and that's never a good sign of things to come.
I, too, would like to know why Qwant is supposedly a liability for this venture. Before today I had never heard of Ecosia or Qwant, so I literally have no idea.
what problem do you have with qwant?
Why is that?
If only they would brainstorm and find better names. 😂
"Google" is worse than either I'd argue. Just doesn't seem that way anymore once you've heard it a thousand times.