Qwant and Ecosia announced that they’ve set up a joint venture (European Search Perspective) to build their own search index.
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If I was an average person, it sounds like building an index is complicated and expensive.
Whereas, what is unlikely is that an index alone would allow a company to build valuable adtech profiles on their users.
On the other hand, if you’re respecting users’ privacy then operating independently of big tech would have made sense the whole time.
It seems like the primary motivating factor for this is Microsoft’s rent seeking.
They put “AI” in their press release. But, operating AI models means that Qwant/Ecosia will be subject to either rent seeking or crushing costs in the near future.
At the same time, [Popov] warned there is growing challenge over where search bots can — or can’t — freely crawl. This is a problem as a search index needs wide access to information sources in order to usefully serve users’ queries.
“Proprietary platforms are often quite unfriendly to attempts to collect information,” Popov told TechCrunch.
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It really does bring up the question what exactly is in this index that Qwant has claimed to have for so long?
When I asked people they always gave vague gestures towards there being a French index but this sort of sounds like even that doesn’t exist?!?!
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Over the last year or so I’ve read comments complaining about how Qwant got many millions of Euros from the French gov’t to build their own index and have little to show for it. Hence my skeptical tone. They blew through all the big money to create – wait for it – yet another Bing retread.
The skeptical part of my brain is thinking that this “partnership” is designed to attract more big fat government grants from France, Germany and the EU while they are all spooked by the US elections AND pending US anti-trust lawsuits. Maybe I’m too cynical. Heh.
That said, the more the merrier in crawling search engines, IMHO. I’ve said all along that Europe is long overdue in developing it’s own search engines (intentional plural). It is dangerous relying on any one country for web search for the entire Western World. So if they actually build a good search engine/index I’m all for it. When it arrives.
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Completely in agreement. I hope that our skepticism is proven to be wrong.
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i’m working on Mike’s points here…
yep, building an index is hugely expensive, and then there’s the crawling issue, bias, blacklisting, etc., etc., etc…
a potential solution to all these problems, in my opinion, is to build a P2P, distributed, decentralized index and figure out a way make it attractive, like monetizing it and paying people a little something to use it
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It’s a worthy aspiration but will be too slow. To search across billions of pages and return results in less than a second means you need a centralised index. An internet data packet typically takes around 100 milliseconds to travel one way from San Francisco to Berlin under normal network conditions. LEO satellites potentially offer to half that time but that’s not going to be anywhere near fast enough.
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