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Ecosia and Qwant team up to launch an independent search index, challenging Google & Bing (alternativeto.net)

submitted 2 days ago by hellfire103@lemmy.ca to c/foss@beehaw.org

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[–] bbbhltz@beehaw.org 40 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I file all of this under "I'll believe it when I see it."

Qwant has claimed since 2016 that they have an index. That lie has earned them investments and funding. They do not have an index and they've said so after the fact. They also give data to Bing. They are not private but they say they are because the data they share is anonymized.
Ecosia is just a Bing frontend like DDG. Caron offsets never work. In order for Ecosia to work you need to see and click on some ads, so anybody using adblockers will not be helping. Their servers aren't green either.
This is because Bing is going to raise their prices and now these companies need to lure in new investors to keep the lights on. It isn't about sovereignty or data privacy; it's just about money.

[–] 56_@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

I assumed Qwant had a small, primarily french index which was mixed with bing results. Their article mentions the new index will be based on existing qwant technologies. Do you have a link to where they admit to not having any index at all?

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Why is it posted here? Will it be opensource?

[–] Fitik@fedia.io 3 points 2 days ago

Same question, I'm pretty sure both Qwant and Ecosia are proprietary

[–] Mettled@reddthat.com 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

They should focus on beating Brave search before going after Bing, much less Google.

[–] Steve@communick.news 9 points 2 days ago

A search index isn't a public facing search engine or service.
They're building a common database for them to both use, as well as others.

So trying to beat Brave or any other search provider, isn't the goal of this project.
It's about creating a new index, Brave, or Bing, or other search providers could use if they wanted.

[–] rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Brave uses their own search index, so they are quite literally trying to do that.

[–] Mettled@reddthat.com 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I was refersncing the difference in user numbers.

[–] yozul@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago

Ecosia already has more users than Brave Search according to the few sources I could find that even tried to estimate market share for search engines that niche. They're all less than a percent either way though, and nobody's gunning to beat the 13th most popular search engine, especially when number 1 has 80-90% of the market according to most estimates.