Qwant, France’s privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index.
The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines — including and especially around generative AI — as well as reducing dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft (Bing) and Google. Both currently rely on Bing’s search APIs while Ecosia also uses Google’s search results.
Maybe it's time for Europeans to support more European tech companies and leave USA-based tech companies behind, here is a good start: https://european-alternatives.eu/
Somebody help get my ideas straight on this one, please.
To my knowledge, Bing and Google search engine are the default options available out there, to the point other search services relay service from those, give or take a few tweaks (DuckDuckGo, Startpage, etc).
Now lets remove those from the picture and what is left?
I read a post yesterday announcing Ecosia amd Qwant were joining efforts to build a fully european search engine (hopefully, yes, but I'm not holding my breath on it). Maybe that is an option. But what else?
Google says it’s running the “time-limited” test because EU regulators and publishers “have asked for additional data about the effect of news content in Search.” The company says it will continue to show results from websites and news publishers located outside the EU, and it will resume showing results from EU news publishers once the test ends.
This is the EU testing what it would be like if they ditched Google, not Google testing what it would be like without the EU. The test also doesn't impact the US.
My brother in Lemmy, this is what stopping Big Tech looks like.
Europe made laws that say that Google and others need to pay if they want to link to EU publishers. Well, maybe the price they are asking is not worth it.
You're right about the firewall energy, but that's simply how these laws work. The point of copyright, as well as age verification and other such laws, is to control who may access certain information.
Big tech needs to be stopped yesterday. This literally has china great firewall energy and I hate it.
This is one of the rare occasions I'm siding with Google. The news outlets are claiming that they should be paid money for those result snippets. It's not because I'm caring for Google so much but because that stance hurts small search engines.