Two search engine startups are teaming up to fight back against Google. These are the German company Ecosia, which donates all its profits to reforestation, and the French startup Qwant, which aims to protect personal data. They want to create their own Internet index. Wired writes about it.
Web indexing, or Internet indexing, is a set of methods for indexing the content of websites or the Internet as a whole. Individual websites may use a traditional index, while search engines typically use keywords and metadata.
Ecosia and Qwant have formed a joint venture called European Search Perspective, based in Paris. Companies that choose to join the initiative will be able to reduce their dependence on Google and Bing and deliver results that better align with their company missions.
“We could derank results from unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” says Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll.
The loss of a small portion of licensing revenue won't be a big blow to Microsoft or Google, which together own about 95% of the global search industry outside of China. But at a time when services such as ChatGPT and TikTok are already redefining the way people search, tiny competitors with the potential to become more attractive to users could force big companies to accelerate investments in regional modernization.
Ownership of the European Search Perspective, or EUSP, will be split equally between Ecosia and Qwant. Ecosia will provide money and data, and Qwant will provide labor. The technical infrastructure will be provided by OVHcloud, which is a co-owner of Qwant. Ecosia has about 1% of the search market in France and Germany and has about 20 million users worldwide, while Qwant reports 6 million users.
The companies are open to both attracting external funding and licensing their index to other companies, including those that may want to use the data to train AI systems.
Developing an index is not a trivial task, but doing it better than Google is difficult. However, Kroll believes that technological advances have made affordable indexing more feasible, and new EU rules limiting the power of the giants make this task worthwhile.
Ecosia and Qwant expect to start testing updated search results in France early next year and in Germany by the end of 2025. One of Google's achievements in indexing is the speed of providing results. Kroll says that EUSP aims to achieve competitive speeds through testing and tweaking.