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Search : Qwant officialise son alliance avec l’allemand Ecosia (French language / Langue française)
From the horse’s mouth
European Search Perspective
Qwant
Ecosia and Qwant join forces to develop European search index – Better Web
My Comments
There is an effort taking place in Europe to create a strong European-focused search engine that supports European languages and wishes, This effort, known as European Search Perspective, is a joint venture between Qwant and Ecosia but works outside of Ecosia’s stewardship-driven business model which means it can raise its own funds from outside investors.
It is part of a Europe-wide effort to create digital sovereignty for regular computing services that Europeans depend on in their personal and business lives and has been effectively facilitated by recent EU legislation to effectively limit the dominant powers of the American Big Tech companies.
The non-profit European Search Perspective effort will provide European digital sovereignty when it comes to online search facilities with its own European-based Webcrawler and index database. This will be a privacy-focused search engine with an emphasis on European values.
The initial results will be used to populate the Ecosia and Qwant search engines but will be open to other independent search engines, AI and similar advanced tech. That would lead to the establishment of European search platforms and AI setups like voice-driven search for smart-speaker, in-car and similar setups.
The first results from this search engine are expected by around the Northern Summer of 2025 with such results appearing in French and German. This is because these languages are the two most common languages used across Continental Europe and are the native languages of Europe’s main economies.
A key issue that people and companies currently find with using independent search engines is that most such engines are working as metasearch engines that use established search data and Webcrawlers, especially Google’s and Microsoft’s resources. The European Search Perspective could allow independent search engines to create their own infrastructure or use European-based infrastructure to detach from Big Tech properly. This could lead to European autonomy for AI and advanced search setups — think of your B&O smart speaker or your BMW car’s voice-driven search working purely from European results.
Personally, I see this as the Airbus or Arianespace of search and allied technologies where those companies represented Europe viably when it came to aerospace technology.
