5mo ago

EU Search engine incoming: Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index

blog.ecosia.org

We’re 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.

Nyheder @feddit.dk

farsinuce @feddit.dk

5mo ago

Ecosia

indgår samarbejde med Qwant om at opbygge et europæisk søgeindeks

blog.ecosia.org /eusp/

Buy European @feddit.uk

Blaze (he/him) @feddit.org

5mo ago

EU Search engine incoming: Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index

blog.ecosia.org /eusp/

Hacker News @lemmy.bestiver.se

RSS Bot @lemmy.bestiver.se

BOT

5mo ago

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

blog.ecosia.org /eusp/

95 comments

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
- 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.
  
  The tree planting sounds so much like greenwashing and an excuse to serve ads
- Organic Maps
  
  Yeah but open street maps does not handle temporary road closures, construction, or temporary one-ways well...
  https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2024/03/30/openstreetmap-temporary-road-closures/
  I don't even know if organic maps respects tags. https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/vuuecd/how_or_where_can_i_submit_temporary_closed_roads/
  It certainly doesn't respect road conditions or road priority. It constantly tries to send me through a 2 meter wide cobblestone and broken up asphalt service road instead of the main residential roads because it "technically" is 50, even with surface marked as bad condition.
  I try to contribute to OSM where I can, but i never can trust organic maps to get me somewhere I haven't been before.
- Try Here WeGo maps, it's the closest one to Google maps but European
- 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
- @Extrawurst @Kualdir For Navigation alone, I find Magic Earth (which uses OSM] to be a perfectly fine replacement, that even offers some features Gmaps hasn't. Like being able to download whole countries for offline navigation, Driver Assistance etc.
  For the reviews... That's more difficult. https://lib.reviews/ is one attempt, but it has nowhere near the dataset (duh) and the reviews are not directly visible on the map.
- 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.
- Here we go, is a pretty good alternative.
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.
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.
Maybe I'll use Ecosia again
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!
Anything that can displace American tech is good.
Any News on when this will go live?
- 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.
  https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/11/ecosia-and-qwant-two-european-search-engines-join-forces-on-building-an-index-to-shrink-reliance-on-big-tech/
  
  1H?
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 :)
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 ! 😊
- I don't know how far in the rabbithole I am, but at this point I feel like it's nearly impossible to find a company that doesn't have dirt on it in one way or another. There are alternatives in some domains, but for search engines, it's really narrowed down to Brave (which also have some not very nice people in it) and Duck duck go, which uses Bing. Which is basically pointless to me, not even talking about using UE products, for me, the best way to get some fresh air is to have companies that have their own search engines (so, not Bing or Google, this is why I don't use alternatives like Starpage or Searx) There's Mojeek, yes, but last time I used it, it was...really bad. I still encourage them tho! I'll give it another shot now.
  
  To me there is also a topic no one is ready to talk about : the way we search the web. I changed the way I search the web. Most of the time I need to browse the same websites so I added keywords search for those search.
  For Mojeek, I took time configuring "focuses" (a feature they have to limit the websites searched to a predefined subset).
  I reduced my need of search engines globally and now I'd say I use Mojeek and there's 50% chance I need to go to DuckDuckGo because Mojeek failed to give me my answers. When I started using Mojeek, I almost never found answers so I'd say it got better!
  Google always suck for me except if I'm looking for products, the only domaineit shines but that's kinda expected to be honest considering Google business model.
- I get your point regarding AI and Ecosia, but this is a personal choice whether to use AI or not. I don’t think it really negates the good they are trying to do. And I expect we’ll see some breakthroughs regarding AI efficiency in the near future.
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.
Search engines are dying, I doubt they'll have much relevance in ten years or so, unless something radically changes. Walled gardens, SEO, AI spam, and so on.
I wonder where the solution lies. The way the modern internet works is completely hostile to the idea of crawler-based search engines, so I feel like the focus should be on creating an alternative, people-first internet which is completely hostile to brands, corporations and advertisers, ran by communities and individuals, etc.
- Far from it, if you're willing to pay for good search check out Kagi. You don't realize how busted search is until you see what it's like when ads aren't the business model.
  
  I've been a paying subscriber to Kagi since 2023. Everything I wrote in my previous comment is still true. I'm glad that it works for you, though.
- How would it be paid for? Subscription?
  
  It already exists, it's called kagi
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 :/
- Hey! Just coming back real quick to let you know they do use Yandex API which is russian. https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo
  
  I know, that's part of the reason why I want to ditch kagi, but I despise ads. Nothing good ever comes from ads.
- 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.
  
  Why do you imagine that?
  
  @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.
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!
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
Good thing I recently changed my standard search engine to Wcosia!
This is the way! Excited to try it!
Qwant is actually pretty decent compared to the competition.
Enamoured with Qwant. Great plugins for iOS/Mac too
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.
- Startpage is american owned https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/4521498779156-What-it-means-for-Startpage-now-that-System1-is-a-publicly-traded-company
  
  Welp, guess I'll test Ecosia then. I really did not enjoy qwant sadly, but haven't tried ecosia yet
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.
- what problem do you have with qwant?
- Why is that?
- 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.
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.

95 comments