Alternative to Google

Ecosia and Qwant build search engine index

The Berlin search engine start-up Ecosia and the French provider Qwant want to make themselves independent of search results from the Internet giants Google and Microsoft in future. The two providers announced the founding of the joint venture European Search Perspective (EUSP) in Paris, which is to develop and build a search engine infrastructure in Europe.

"EUSP wants to contribute to Europe's digital sovereignty and ensure that the continent has a strong, independent alternative to existing search technologies," explained Ecosia and Qwant. The two providers see themselves primarily as an alternative to Google, but currently cannot do without content from large Internet companies. Ecosia and Qwant rely primarily on Microsoft's Bing platform, although Ecosia switched to a mixture of Google and Bing search results last year.

The Berlin-based start-up Ecosia positions itself as a green search engine and promises to tackle climate change and plant trees with its profits. Qwant emphasizes that users are not tracked and advertises itself as a "search engine that knows nothing about you". However, the two European companies have only enjoyed limited economic success to date, achieving market shares in the low single-digit percentage range.

"Making the search engine market more competitive in the long term"
The new joint venture will operate outside Ecosia's non-profit business model and will be able to raise external capital from investors for long-term expansion. The index could be licensed by other search engines and could serve as a central resource for the European data industry, for example as a transparent and secure data pool for new AI technologies.

"This change will make the search engine market more competitive in the long term, as leading alternative search engines in Europe are now developing their own search technologies," explained Christian Kroll, founder and CEO of Ecosia. He held out the prospect of the European search technology going live in 2025, initially in France.