[HN Gopher] Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European ...
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Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index
Author : amarcheschi
Score : 492 points
Date : 2025-03-09 17:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ecosia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ecosia.org)
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| Excellent! -- despite being overdue.
|
| I hope these Europe-based joint ventures increase in every
| aspect.
| n_ary wrote:
| 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.
| matt-p wrote:
| I agree. Unfortunate because a https://www.mojeek.com/ and
| ecosia partnership would be genuinely fruitful.
| timeon wrote:
| > exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.
|
| Well this is the old article (maybe not 6 but few months).
| ost-ing wrote:
| > 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
| mrweasel wrote:
| > 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.
| palata wrote:
| 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.
| drannex wrote:
| 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.
| maelito wrote:
| Qwant is Bing. I've been comparing a few searches, it gave me
| about the same results as bing.
| bad_user wrote:
| 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.
| matt-p wrote:
| 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).
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I pay for Kagi, and I wouldn't mind paying as much for a European
| sovereign alternative.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Very nice.
|
| Due to recent events I'm trying to divest from US tech as much as
| possible.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| 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.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Americans are really not too worried about it.
| dismalaf wrote:
| 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...
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| https://commoncrawl.org/
| ricardo81 wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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
| mdaniel wrote:
| > - 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
| ricardo81 wrote:
| >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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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...
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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.
| fifilura wrote:
| Europeans will not start using a Muscovite search engine.
|
| (Edit: R -> Muscovite)
| fakedang wrote:
| Is there a difference anyways between Russian and
| Muscovite? After all, Muscovites imposed their culture
| forcefully all over Russia as much as they could.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| The reactionary spirit among the Western technical elites
| never ceases to amaze me, it shouldn't by this point, but
| it still does.
| fifilura wrote:
| You may be right? It was written in anger.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| It takes a lot to admit one's missteps! Appreciate the
| gesture, as an innocent byreader
| wqaatwt wrote:
| It still seems very moderate compared to the fascist
| imperialist spirit amongst the elite (and majority of the
| overall population) of that other country..
| paganel wrote:
| I wouldn't say that the country that defeated Nazism and
| liberated Auschwitz (among many other related things) is
| fascist.
| fifilura wrote:
| Hm, that seems like a false dichtonomy.
|
| Why could it not be both?
| paganel wrote:
| You mean Fascists killing Nazis and liberating Auschwitz?
| That's the very definition of historical revisionism.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Do you lack the general sense of time and can't tell if
| we're living in the 1940s or 2020s?
|
| Surely Russia can't be imperialist wither because they
| defeated Napoleon back in 1813? (your "argument" makes
| about as much sense).
| riffraff wrote:
| the Brits defeated Napoleon, and that's why there never
| was a British empire.
| BartjeD wrote:
| A lot changes in 80 years, and fascism and communism are
| both totalitarian ideologies.
| paganel wrote:
| Communism gave my parents and (younger) me free
| Education, free Healthcare and very cheap Housing, I
| don't care about its supposed totalitarianism, I just
| want that back, can I?
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Depending on where live now you can try asking for asylum
| in North Korea? They'd probably love a western defector
| in a time like this.
|
| Also you want what back? To be younger? Because all of
| those things are available in much of western world.
|
| You might say "housing" but while it was technically
| cheap in the USSR it was extremely limited. There was
| never enough housing for everyone and multiple
| generations often had to live in tiny "affordable"
| apartments.
| martin_a wrote:
| "We fought Nazis once, so we can't be Nazis ourselves"?
| Sounds... Interesting...
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Yes and let us remind ourselves that they only did this
| once they were themselves backstabbed by the Nazis that
| they very eagerly allied with just 2 years prior. In
| fact, they happily divvied up Poland with said Nazis.
| There is no doubt about Russia's intentions for Eastern
| Europe had the Ribbentrop-Molotov alliance held.
|
| You must be trolling to try and come here preaching that
| Russia were good guys in WW2.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| I'd guess Stalin's idea was to fund (literally, Germany
| wouldn't have had enough oil without the Soviets) the
| nazi invasion of France and then swoop and "liberate"
| Europe after a couple of years of brutal WW1 style
| fighting.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks
| like a duck then what do you think it might be?
|
| So because Russians did something right* 80 years ago
| they have a permanent moral high ground in perpetuity?
|
| How does that make any sense?
|
| *of course let's not get into how WW2 started and how
| would Germany would have had a much harder time defeating
| France with their horse powered military without massive
| Soviet support..).
| wave-function wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You held respect previously and this is what caused you
| to lose it? Or you never held respect and use whatever to
| feed you?
| ggm wrote:
| Didn't Yandex RU divest and its now EU owned in Europe?
| could be a thin shell of course.
| alapshin wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| Thanks for the correction.
| that_lurker wrote:
| Kagi is using it for image search and a lot of people do
| use Kagi
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I do hope you realise that there's subjective and then
| there's "'a lot' of people use Kagi" subjective :)
| that_lurker wrote:
| That I do. I should have writen that after my morning
| coffee.
| silversmith wrote:
| Based on what's being commented here - some absolutely
| will. And sitting on the eastern border of EU, that truly
| scares me.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I don't think anyone in their right mind is advocating
| severing ties with the USA to get closer to _Russia_.
| paganel wrote:
| 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.
| cookiemonsieur wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| > you know what I'm talking about
|
| Can you be more specific?
| guywithahat wrote:
| (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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Can you give an example of what "politically sensitive
| stuff" means here? Without context it contains
| multitudes...
| pidgeon_lover wrote:
| 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.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| 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)
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Part of the reason Europeans want to shun the USA is that
| it is sidling up with Russia.
| cookiemonsieur wrote:
| I certainly will, thanks for the plug.
| kome wrote:
| yandex is very very good. i wonder why is not used more.
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| 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 EUR2/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?
| AndreasRenner wrote:
| Hi, our 2EUR/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.
| nanna wrote:
| Hi Andreas, the Firefox 'start install' link is broken
| ("Hoppla! Wir konnen 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?
| tremon wrote:
| 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.
| mdaniel wrote:
| 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
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| tremon wrote:
| 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.
| AndreasRenner wrote:
| 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 ...
| Einenlum wrote:
| Seems like they partly do use their own index
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| AndreasRenner wrote:
| 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
| user876 wrote:
| 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
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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.
| scarab92 wrote:
| 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?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > "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.
| dmje wrote:
| 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
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| freeAgent wrote:
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > 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.
| dmje wrote:
| Sure. But what seems to always be attached to anyone doing
| anything in search is the "Google Killer" expectation...
| submeta wrote:
| 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| I am so ready for it.
| Palmik wrote:
| You realize that an index is still necessary for RAG?
|
| Where do you think the results used by Perplexity, Open AI etc.
| come from?
| osmarks wrote:
| There is at least one organization doing actual embedding-
| based search (Exa). I wrote about this a bit: https://docs.os
| marks.net/hypha/osmarks.net_web_search_plan_%....
| Palmik wrote:
| 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.
| silversmith wrote:
| 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.
| guappa wrote:
| All the apps use the norwegian service anyway
| Pooge wrote:
| 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
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| preisschild wrote:
| Those laws weren't passed. The US Cloud Act and others were.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| Pooge wrote:
| 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...
| pjc50 wrote:
| & 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)
| guappa wrote:
| Have you never heard of snowden?
| Pooge wrote:
| I do. I even have his book. What about him?
| regularjack wrote:
| The subtitle of that article is:
|
| German police are being investigated for using Covid-
| tracking data as part of a probe into a death.
| Pooge wrote:
| The fact being that they (illegally) got access to data
| that was to be used for health purposes.
| timeon wrote:
| If you do not trust France and Germany because of proposed laws
| against privacy that did _not_ pass there then who do you
| trust?
| Pooge wrote:
| 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".
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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.
| bad_user wrote:
| Yes, be careful with Qwant, use Google or Bing.
| VSerge wrote:
| 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.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| 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.
| nunobrito wrote:
| 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.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| 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
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Why not try Kagi? Serious question.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| 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
| dingnuts wrote:
| Reddit comments are mostly bots shilling ideology or
| products nowadays though. At least that's the impression
| I get.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| It's still okay for specific niches or local communities
| imho
| jorvi wrote:
| 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.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Ok the points you made are cool
| notpushkin wrote:
| 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.
| Fnoord wrote:
| 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.
| tensor wrote:
| 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!
| staticelf wrote:
| 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.
| dantondwa wrote:
| 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.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| > 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.
| azeirah wrote:
| 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.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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).
| timeon wrote:
| This is true but Civil law seems to be bit less
| "flexible" than Common law.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| This isn't a civil law vs common law thing.
|
| It's a US vs sensible countries thing.
| Propelloni wrote:
| 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 Vermogen" (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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >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."
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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.
| Propelloni wrote:
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| 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.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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.
| pythux wrote:
| > 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
| baxtr wrote:
| 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.
| h1fra wrote:
| 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.)
| tcit wrote:
| Leandri 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).
| wiether wrote:
| 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.
| nunobrito wrote:
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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 Dopfner wants to be seen
| spread.
|
| Second to none in Germany, but probably normal in the US.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >>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 Dopfner or Rupert Murdoch?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| In the spirit of international cooperation: _?Por que no
| los dos?_
| morkalork wrote:
| Would you say they are comparable to Rupert Murdoch and
| Conrad Black then?
| luckylion wrote:
| > 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.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| Considering how German government is persecuting people for
| being pro-Palestine, I wouldn't want to share one bit of data
| with German entities.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| 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?
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > 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.
| benrutter wrote:
| > 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?
| oskarw85 wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| slevis wrote:
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| guys... you really flagged a comment for saying that yandex is
| actually a good alternative? seriously?
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| I had NO idea about this feature... thanks!
| benrutter wrote:
| 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.
| moooo99 wrote:
| 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.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Why are you dissapointed in Ecosia for Qwant getting investment
| from Springer?
| Fnoord wrote:
| (2024)
|
| This news is from mid December 2024.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "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".
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