Report: “Two Upstart Search Engines are Teaming Up to Take on Google”

From WIRED:

Berlin-based Ecosia, which donates its profits to tree planting, and its Paris-based competitor Qwant are announcing Tuesday that they will team up to develop an index of the web.

The for-profit joint venture, dubbed European Search Perspective and located in Paris, could allow the small companies and any others that decide to join up to reduce their reliance on Google and Bing and serve results that are better tailored to their companies’ missions and Europeans’ tastes. “We could de-rank results from unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” [Ecosia CEO Christian] Kroll says of the eco-minded Ecosia.

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Developing an index—identifying all the websites out on the internet and making their contents searchable—is no trivial task. Doing it better than Google, which has honed its approach over decades, is even more daunting.

But Kroll believes tech advances have made affordable indexing more possible and new EU regulations limiting the power of gatekeepers such as Google are making it a worthwhile pursuit. In the past few years, other Google competitors have built their own indexes, including Brave and the now-defunct Neeva.

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Neither Ecosia nor Qwant will stop using Bing or Google altogether. However, they aim to diversify the core tech supporting their services with their own index. It will lower their operational costs, and serve as a technical base to fuel their own product development as GenAI technologies take up a more central role in many consumer-facing digital services.

Both search engines have already dabbled in integrating GenAI features. Expect more on this front, although they aren’t planning to develop AI model development themselves. They say they will continue to rely on API access to major platforms’ large language models (LLMs) to power these additions.

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“With the emergence of AI tools there is a different demand now for a search index,” Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll suggested. “The two providers, Bing and Google, are basically getting more reluctant to make their index accessible. And of course, as a search engine, we need an index. So that’s partially why we want to make sure we have access.”

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Rival search engine Brave, which much like Qwant has a sales pitch that foregrounds privacy, has already built its own search index. It even removed the last API calls for text-based searches to Bing in April last year when it touted its service as a “real alternative to Big Tech search.”

Asked about this, Abecassis suggested Brave’s index cleaves closer to Google and Bing in the technical approach. Whereas he emphasized that EUP is being built from scratch, claiming it will be “very different” and will deliver more diverse search results.

“We don’t just copy Google or Microsoft and learn from them,” he stressed. “We really index all the documents that are available. We understand the documents, and then we have a team that works to find the best match between a document and the [search] query.”

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