French and German search engines unite against Google

Berlin-based internet search engine Ecosia and its Parisian rival Qwant have announced the launch of a joint venture to create an online index. The project is called European Search Perspective (EUSP) and its headquarters will be located in Paris. The new search engine is expected to help Europe reduce its dependence on Google and Bing, and the results it offers will be better suited to the objectives of local companies and the preferences of Europeans.

Image source: Gerd Altmann / pixabay.com

Currently, Ecosia provides travel-related queries with links to airline booking services, although the platform’s environmentally-conscious CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to enrich the search results with options for what he considers less harmful train crossings. The platform receives results ready-made from Google and Bing, whose search engines are licensed by Ecosia. Microsoft and Google now own 95% of the global search market outside of China. A revolution is already ripe in this segment: the popularity of ChatGPT and TikTok is growing, the attractiveness of small projects is growing, so large players can also accelerate changes.

Ecosia and Qwant established the EUSP project in equal shares; The German side will invest money in the joint venture and transfer information resources, the French side will provide labor. The technical infrastructure will be provided by OVHcloud, to which Qwant will allocate part of its share. Ecosia now owns 1% of the search market in France and Germany, its services are used by 20 million people around the world; Qwant’s audience is 6 million users. The material resources of both companies are limited: in the first nine months of 2024, Ecosia’s revenue decreased by 8% to €24.2 million. The joint venture is open to external sources of financing; EUSP is ready to license its index to other companies, including for AI training.

Developing an index, that is, identifying all sites on the Internet and making their content searchable, is not an easy task. And it’s even harder to do it better than Google, which has spent decades honing its solutions. EUSP intends to solve the problem with the help of modern technologies, and in the light of new European laws aimed at limiting the dominance of technology giants, the project seems promising, Mr. Kroll is sure. In recent years, the developers of the Brave browser and the now defunct Neeva platform have created their own search indexes. An additional incentive for the development of EUSP was the increase in Bing license prices last year.

The new search engine will be launched in France early next year, and German users will be able to use it from the end of 2025. EUSP intends to implement testing and debugging mechanisms to ensure that the system is as fast as Google. Perhaps this will be a European version of the South Korean Naver – Google once disappointed Korean users with irrelevant results and spam in search results. Today, Naver has more than half of the country’s search market. EUSP has a chance to break into countries that have not yet received sufficient quality service from the tech giants. For example, YouTube search queries in Amharic, one of the languages ​​of Ethiopia, may result in sensitive content; and the researchers described the search itself in this language as stunning and “terrible.”