If you ask the search engine Ecosia For “Paris to Prague”, flight booking websites will dominate almost all results. But Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to introduce more train options, which he believes are better for the environment. But how Its results are obtained under license from Google and Bing from MicrosoftEcosia has little control over what is displayed. Kroll is keen for that to change.
A web index
The Berlin company, which donates its profits to tree planting, and its competitor Qwant, based in Paris, announced on Tuesday that will come together to develop a web index.
The joint for-profit company, called European Search Perspective (EUSP) and based in Paris, could allow small businesses, and any others that decide to join, reduce your dependence on Google and Bing to offer results better adapted to the missions of their companies and the tastes of Europeans. “We could eliminate the results of unethical or unsustainable companies and better classify the good companies,” says Kroll of the green company Ecosia.
Losing a little licensing revenue won’t be a big blow to Microsoft or Googlewhich together hold around 95% of the global search industry outside of China. But at a time when services like ChatGPT and TikTok are already redefining the way users search, the possibility of smaller rivals becoming more attractive to users could force large companies to accelerate their investments in regional improvements.
Ownership of European Search Perspective will be shared equally between Ecosia and Qwant: Ecosia will provide the money and dataand Qwant labor. The technical infrastructure will come from OVHcloud, which shares ownership with Qwant. Ecosia has a search market share of around 1% in France and Germany, and claims to have about 20 million users worldwide, while Qwant has about 6 million.
For Ecosia and Qwant, conquering the world beyond French- and German-speaking users will require success at home and increasing revenue, which largely comes from advertising. The challenge is evident. Ecosia’s sales, according to its data, have fallen by 8% to 24.2 million euros in the first nine months of this year, compared to the same period in 2023. It is not guaranteed that more accurate results will help boost the business: Ads are still provided by Microsoft and Google. But Kroll says that will soon change.
The companies are willing to both raise external funding for EUSP and license their index to other companies, including those who want to use the data to train artificial intelligence systems: “We are bringing together the most experienced search engineers to create a technology sovereignty in Europe, especially for French and German, and we are very confident that this will attract the investment community,” says Kroll.
How to make an internet index
Developing an index (identifying all the websites on the Internet and making their content searchable) is not a trivial task. Doing better than Google, which has perfected its method for decades, is even more daunting.
But Kroll believes technological advances have made indexing more affordable, and new EU regulations limiting the power of gatekeepers like Google make it worthwhile. In recent years, other Google competitors have created their own indexes, such as Brave and the now-defunct Neeva.
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