If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?
Current search trends, and which results get clicked for which queries, are still intrinsically valuable. Mostly for the search index signals as you mention, and other things like updating recrawl rates, etc.
Even for established players these have value because the index gets stale quickly for certain queries that many people care about a lot. Even though that value isn't fungible, or enough to break even if it were, it's the kind of value that keeps the search engine competitive.
Search engines should be run as utilities. Unfortunately we are now in the stage where utilities (and other must haves such as education) are run as private enterprises.
Food production doesn't have the same dynamics as search does. There is little value in thousands of small search farmers each indexing their own acre of the Internet space. That's why it should be run as a utility, it's not about importance.
Vivaldi has a (as private as possible, check their blog) whitelist for click attribution. My guess they refer to ads on search engines on their partner search engine.
Every time I link someone Ecosia, they always complain that it doesn't have a "clean start page", and I do agree. That, and not having the ability to see less or more of certain pages is why no one I know uses Ecosia.
That was remarkably fast, even if it only covers a subset of French searches. I love Ecosia, but I half expected this to be more an PR announcement when it was first presented, not that they'd actually deliver anything, and certainly not so fast.
Great job, already start using it and looking good. Crawl the f..k out of internet same way all the big techs are doing, at least what´s European stays in EU. The ethics should apply to all equally. Thank you and Viva la France.
It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt.
Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
US solutions are incredibly self-centered. It's very visible to Europeans how American cultural norms completely dominate the digital public sphere. In 2025, this feels dangerous to many of us.
Examples of American cultural attitudes permeating social media platforms that have felt very odd in Europe: Firearms and violence (which is apparently allowed), and nudity (which is apparently always sexual).
The concerns about the current direction of EU regulation are valid and huge, I get that.
What's more surprising to me (also EU citizen) is how readily able we are to adopt US cultural norms to our own.
The most glaring and obvious example is the narrative surrounding race/gender relations. The EU has it's own racial issues but we get BLM riots too and we get chest thumping misandrists in Sweden.. the country that has done the most to promote gender equality of any nation on the planet.
BLM riots don't make sense in the UK for example, our race relations are much more nuanced, difficult, and probably put the Pakistani community in the most visibly disadvantaged position; but there's no space to talk about that as we're discussing George Floyd and police brutality (which, largely is not a UK issue at all).
I know for Americans this might come off as tone deaf because everything over there is so polarised it's like a battle to the death; but I think a major reason the right wing is growing in the EU is because of US cultural norms becoming prevalent (individualism over collectivism) and that naturally comes with some amount of xenophobia; as if you're living an individualistic mindset you naturally see resources as zero-sum.
The growth of right-wing movements thrive, ironically, by positioning themselves as a bulwark against what they frame as foreign cultural encroachment. It seems we're stuck trying to choose between a censored European world or an American one that doesn't fit us at all.
But if I have to choose, I choose the one that actually sort of fits.
Denmark have in the past few elections had a guy run on the promise of reinstating the Glass–Steagall Act. No word on how a Dane, in the Danish parliament would even be in a position of reintroducing a US law.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people around you adopt US mentality, problems and problem solving. This can be simple things like talking to the police, ignoring the fact that there's a huge difference in talking to a police officer in Gothenburg vs. Baltimore. Some times you even run into people protesting something that's not a problem, but US centric social media has lead them to believe it is. At the same time many are completely oblivious to local issues.
Clearly, American social platforms are the vehicles to deliver this division, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that the message is being equally engineered and promoted by other powers as well (Russia and China as a bare minimum, from the top of recently documented elections interferences).
That's not to absolve Americans at all, but rather to reinforce the idea that the EU should reign over those platforms in the EU, and/or promote its own.
I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
> I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
Our local right-wingers want to shut down our equivalent to the education department because “they are too woke”. Meanwhile those same “nationalists” want to stop funding local culture in favor of importing US culture.
This is in Finland of all places. I’m tired of our local social media drones going crazy over US nonsense but our right-wing parties want more of it.
The global cultural influence of the US is really showing and it’s going to be a wild ride as the world shifts to reject it as that influence starts turning against us.
Woke ideology is a rebranding of social democracy and egalitarian humanism, and certainly not invented in US.
What is American is the endless need to slap a scary label on it, turn it into a culture war football, and export the outrage everywhere else. We’ve been talking about equality, workers' rights, and anti-discrimination in Europe for over a century without needing Fox News to tell us it's dangerous. Now suddenly our own politicians are parroting this imported panic as if it were homegrown wisdom.
It’s great to have US offerings, but when US offerings become extreme self-centered as US offerings tend to be, I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the oligarch‘s profits and feelings” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
> Because it strengthens Europe’s long-term competitiveness, democratic control, and stability.
I don't see the point. What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish? The chat control plans, the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Digital Services Act, the militarization - none of it seems to be democratic tied to any values surrounding freedom.
Chat control is bad, but it was voted out multiple times already, and is fundamentally incompatible with several member states' constitutions (based on a comment, didn't read more into it, but I believe Romania and Germany, among others).
They just try to push it through when people are occupied with something else, which is very unfortunate (and they (who?) should be punished for it, I would want a society that "cancels" these politicians immediately for supporting such an anti-freedom policy), but that's it.
The EU is still a shining beacon of democracy in the world.
oh yeah, democracy with actual, real kingdoms (10 of them or how many?) kings and constitutions that gives real rights to king. Const. that actually puts king above law and says "sacrosanct".
what democracy? Yeah some of them have it but not EU and all.
I agree that the Chat Control plans are bad, however do you think that particular concern is better handled in China or the US?
Also note they are not the law specifically because of active democracy.
The other points you mentioned I don’t see how they are anti democratic.
It may be imperfect, but having a system controlled by someone you vote for and can ultimately kick out is better than having a system controlled by another country's political apparatus.
I disagree. It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country, then a censored/corrupted service controlled by their own country's government. The former meets the user's requirements, today; the "democracy can fix it!" one is an unrealized promise of the future.
If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
Kagi user here, but one could argue that there is no such thing as un-backdoored service when the US government can knock at Google's door (kagi uses GCP) and ask the data, with little to no accountability or due process.
So I agree with you, but the premises are quite restrictive.
> What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish?
First, the claim is that it strengthens democratic control. I can't see how you could be against that.
Second, the more, the merrier. In this case, more search indices means more search freedom. If your country censors something, you can try another index. But only if that index actually exists, and falls under different rules.
Militarization is necessary. The other stuff is criminality and not-quite-criminality-but-still-enough-that-we-don't-want-them-anyway by a bunch of 'leaders' who we can hope to eventually oust.
I also like this as a platform for my own ideas. I think search (also RAG) is shit and that we need longer, higher quality vector representations of texts, and if I develop one I could potentially convince the people running this to try it.
You raise a fair point. Equating 'digital sovereignty' with democracy isn't straightforward, and there’s a risk of it becoming just another technocratic project. But as a step toward diversified infrastructure and more democratic tech, it seems worthwhile to me. It’s also about breaking monopolies and creating alternatives, whether they’re perfect or not.
While I mostly agree with your raised issues, technically you have mixed up two distinct things: "Europe/European" and EU! "Europe" is larger than the EU and the mentioned European (cultural) values do no necessarily coincide with whatever the EU is doing...
The quoted part doesn't say anything about "freedom", are you sure that maybe your perspective (coming from the US I guess?) matches with the values Europeans want?
Personally, I want more of my computing, in every sense, to be closer to me. Ideally in Spain, but OK within EU too, so if there are no search indexes run by EU entities, then that's something we should improve.
How do you even build a search index today when websites barely link to each other?
Nowadays the bulk of linking goes to ecommerce sites (amazon) from content farms (reddit) and all those sites are submitted directly to Google. I don't think crawlable internet exists anymore.
You can start with seeds like common crawl, and go from there. You can also get DNS records from various providers. Then there's SSL cert logs that you can crawl. Plenty of sources, if you have funding (search by itself without ads sponsoring it might be a net loss, except some niche uses like kagi?)
It isn't impossible nowadays to enumerate domain names using DNS data and score them based on the content they serve. Isn't that what we really want as users? Scoring based not on proxies for relevance like referral count, but on viewable content?
It's possible indeed as I'm doing it for another reason (monitoring sovereigty).
You can ask Icann [0] access to gTld domain list files (if you have a legitimate reason to do so). Once access you are granted access to a gTld, you can download a compressed csv file with a line per couple <domain, nameserver>.
I make no assumption beyond the one that if you want to index a page you need to know its address and if the author of the website is not going to give it to you because you are not Google and no known website links to it, then you have no way of finding it out. You can't build anything independently. You have to go to Google.
If nothing else, how do you think various LLMs using tools are doing their web searching?
Besides, plenty of people resort to traditional searches for various reasons, often because LLMs aren't happy to talk about any topic, while search engines usually lets you search for pretty much whatever you want.
People who do not want to read and trust the slop that whatever LLM du jour is regurgitating after calling out to said search engines.
Humans are already unfortunately prone to bullshitting and bloviating, but they are also used to dealing with other humans: there's no need to add an additional layer of both from a black box which does not behave like one.
If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?
Current search trends, and which results get clicked for which queries, are still intrinsically valuable. Mostly for the search index signals as you mention, and other things like updating recrawl rates, etc.
Even for established players these have value because the index gets stale quickly for certain queries that many people care about a lot. Even though that value isn't fungible, or enough to break even if it were, it's the kind of value that keeps the search engine competitive.
Search engines should be run as utilities. Unfortunately we are now in the stage where utilities (and other must haves such as education) are run as private enterprises.
of food sector. I guess food is more important for survival than education.
Food production doesn't have the same dynamics as search does. There is little value in thousands of small search farmers each indexing their own acre of the Internet space. That's why it should be run as a utility, it's not about importance.
Vivaldi has a (as private as possible, check their blog) whitelist for click attribution. My guess they refer to ads on search engines on their partner search engine.
related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811879
Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech
Every time I link someone Ecosia, they always complain that it doesn't have a "clean start page", and I do agree. That, and not having the ability to see less or more of certain pages is why no one I know uses Ecosia.
This was actually my first thought too when I got to the page.
It doesn't look like your usual search page and I had the feeling I'm not on the main page at all.
I'll still try it as my new default FF search engine since google got really bad in the past months.
That was remarkably fast, even if it only covers a subset of French searches. I love Ecosia, but I half expected this to be more an PR announcement when it was first presented, not that they'd actually deliver anything, and certainly not so fast.
Did Qwants already work on an index?
Great job, already start using it and looking good. Crawl the f..k out of internet same way all the big techs are doing, at least what´s European stays in EU. The ethics should apply to all equally. Thank you and Viva la France.
It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
US solutions are incredibly self-centered. It's very visible to Europeans how American cultural norms completely dominate the digital public sphere. In 2025, this feels dangerous to many of us.
Examples of American cultural attitudes permeating social media platforms that have felt very odd in Europe: Firearms and violence (which is apparently allowed), and nudity (which is apparently always sexual).
The concerns about the current direction of EU regulation are valid and huge, I get that.
> US solutions are incredibly self-centered.
Even on here on somewhat technical discussions it's pretty much very visible what the US point of view is.
What's more surprising to me (also EU citizen) is how readily able we are to adopt US cultural norms to our own.
The most glaring and obvious example is the narrative surrounding race/gender relations. The EU has it's own racial issues but we get BLM riots too and we get chest thumping misandrists in Sweden.. the country that has done the most to promote gender equality of any nation on the planet.
BLM riots don't make sense in the UK for example, our race relations are much more nuanced, difficult, and probably put the Pakistani community in the most visibly disadvantaged position; but there's no space to talk about that as we're discussing George Floyd and police brutality (which, largely is not a UK issue at all).
I know for Americans this might come off as tone deaf because everything over there is so polarised it's like a battle to the death; but I think a major reason the right wing is growing in the EU is because of US cultural norms becoming prevalent (individualism over collectivism) and that naturally comes with some amount of xenophobia; as if you're living an individualistic mindset you naturally see resources as zero-sum.
The growth of right-wing movements thrive, ironically, by positioning themselves as a bulwark against what they frame as foreign cultural encroachment. It seems we're stuck trying to choose between a censored European world or an American one that doesn't fit us at all.
But if I have to choose, I choose the one that actually sort of fits.
Denmark have in the past few elections had a guy run on the promise of reinstating the Glass–Steagall Act. No word on how a Dane, in the Danish parliament would even be in a position of reintroducing a US law.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people around you adopt US mentality, problems and problem solving. This can be simple things like talking to the police, ignoring the fact that there's a huge difference in talking to a police officer in Gothenburg vs. Baltimore. Some times you even run into people protesting something that's not a problem, but US centric social media has lead them to believe it is. At the same time many are completely oblivious to local issues.
Clearly, American social platforms are the vehicles to deliver this division, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that the message is being equally engineered and promoted by other powers as well (Russia and China as a bare minimum, from the top of recently documented elections interferences).
That's not to absolve Americans at all, but rather to reinforce the idea that the EU should reign over those platforms in the EU, and/or promote its own.
Ah yes, the cancer of hamburgerization
I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
> I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
Our local right-wingers want to shut down our equivalent to the education department because “they are too woke”. Meanwhile those same “nationalists” want to stop funding local culture in favor of importing US culture.
This is in Finland of all places. I’m tired of our local social media drones going crazy over US nonsense but our right-wing parties want more of it.
The global cultural influence of the US is really showing and it’s going to be a wild ride as the world shifts to reject it as that influence starts turning against us.
Woke ideology was also imported whole sale from the US to your universities, so the American tint is both on action and reaction.
Woke ideology is a rebranding of social democracy and egalitarian humanism, and certainly not invented in US.
What is American is the endless need to slap a scary label on it, turn it into a culture war football, and export the outrage everywhere else. We’ve been talking about equality, workers' rights, and anti-discrimination in Europe for over a century without needing Fox News to tell us it's dangerous. Now suddenly our own politicians are parroting this imported panic as if it were homegrown wisdom.
It’s great to have US offerings, but when US offerings become extreme self-centered as US offerings tend to be, I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the oligarch‘s profits and feelings” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
> Because it strengthens Europe’s long-term competitiveness, democratic control, and stability.
I don't see the point. What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish? The chat control plans, the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Digital Services Act, the militarization - none of it seems to be democratic tied to any values surrounding freedom.
Chat control is bad, but it was voted out multiple times already, and is fundamentally incompatible with several member states' constitutions (based on a comment, didn't read more into it, but I believe Romania and Germany, among others).
They just try to push it through when people are occupied with something else, which is very unfortunate (and they (who?) should be punished for it, I would want a society that "cancels" these politicians immediately for supporting such an anti-freedom policy), but that's it.
The EU is still a shining beacon of democracy in the world.
> Chat control is bad, but it was voted out multiple times already
It’s gaining momentum again, so let’s not rest on past victories.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-2b-dual-tranche-note...
I do agree with your overall point.
oh yeah, democracy with actual, real kingdoms (10 of them or how many?) kings and constitutions that gives real rights to king. Const. that actually puts king above law and says "sacrosanct".
what democracy? Yeah some of them have it but not EU and all.
Most are constitutional monarchies in which the monarch is a head of state with no or very limited political power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchies_in_Europe
There's so many actual reasons to complain about lack of democracy at the EU level; constitutional monarchies are certainly not one of them.
Are you being completely honest here?
I agree that the Chat Control plans are bad, however do you think that particular concern is better handled in China or the US? Also note they are not the law specifically because of active democracy.
The other points you mentioned I don’t see how they are anti democratic.
It may be imperfect, but having a system controlled by someone you vote for and can ultimately kick out is better than having a system controlled by another country's political apparatus.
I disagree. It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country, then a censored/corrupted service controlled by their own country's government. The former meets the user's requirements, today; the "democracy can fix it!" one is an unrealized promise of the future.
If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
Kagi user here, but one could argue that there is no such thing as un-backdoored service when the US government can knock at Google's door (kagi uses GCP) and ask the data, with little to no accountability or due process.
So I agree with you, but the premises are quite restrictive.
> What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish?
First, the claim is that it strengthens democratic control. I can't see how you could be against that.
Second, the more, the merrier. In this case, more search indices means more search freedom. If your country censors something, you can try another index. But only if that index actually exists, and falls under different rules.
Militarization is necessary. The other stuff is criminality and not-quite-criminality-but-still-enough-that-we-don't-want-them-anyway by a bunch of 'leaders' who we can hope to eventually oust.
I also like this as a platform for my own ideas. I think search (also RAG) is shit and that we need longer, higher quality vector representations of texts, and if I develop one I could potentially convince the people running this to try it.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Europe has its flaws but it's still the best game in town.
You raise a fair point. Equating 'digital sovereignty' with democracy isn't straightforward, and there’s a risk of it becoming just another technocratic project. But as a step toward diversified infrastructure and more democratic tech, it seems worthwhile to me. It’s also about breaking monopolies and creating alternatives, whether they’re perfect or not.
While I mostly agree with your raised issues, technically you have mixed up two distinct things: "Europe/European" and EU! "Europe" is larger than the EU and the mentioned European (cultural) values do no necessarily coincide with whatever the EU is doing...
> to any values surrounding freedom
The quoted part doesn't say anything about "freedom", are you sure that maybe your perspective (coming from the US I guess?) matches with the values Europeans want?
Personally, I want more of my computing, in every sense, to be closer to me. Ideally in Spain, but OK within EU too, so if there are no search indexes run by EU entities, then that's something we should improve.
You have a point but he does too.
Without you own search engines (or tech companies in general) you depend on third parties and become basically a puppet.
Amazing how this place immediately attacks Europe every time something appears that might threaten US companies in the slightest.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said: at least the handle is one of us.
It’s the less bad than America option.
You don't see the point because of a possible law that hasn't even been passed yet? And instead have Trump order you around?
Did you think that comparison through? :)
"search index aimed to support a sovereign, privacy-first search infrastructure for Europe"
We will see which kind of data privacy they will go for this time.
- The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user
- The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to European companies.
Here is the actual search page. I searched for something, looks pretty good. One small blow against enshittification:
https://www.ecosia.org/
How do you know those good-looking results were served from the new index, rather than being just rebranded Bing API results?
(only in France)
and even there only a small part. Goal for EOY is 50%.
more precisely:
> We’re aiming to serve 50% of French search queries by the end of the year, and will soon start rolling out to other countries.
How do you even build a search index today when websites barely link to each other?
Nowadays the bulk of linking goes to ecommerce sites (amazon) from content farms (reddit) and all those sites are submitted directly to Google. I don't think crawlable internet exists anymore.
> How do you even build a search index today
You can start with seeds like common crawl, and go from there. You can also get DNS records from various providers. Then there's SSL cert logs that you can crawl. Plenty of sources, if you have funding (search by itself without ads sponsoring it might be a net loss, except some niche uses like kagi?)
It isn't impossible nowadays to enumerate domain names using DNS data and score them based on the content they serve. Isn't that what we really want as users? Scoring based not on proxies for relevance like referral count, but on viewable content?
It's possible indeed as I'm doing it for another reason (monitoring sovereigty).
You can ask Icann [0] access to gTld domain list files (if you have a legitimate reason to do so). Once access you are granted access to a gTld, you can download a compressed csv file with a line per couple <domain, nameserver>.
[0] https://czds.icann.org/home
You are making a broad generalization and even it is based on the assumption that the page-ranking algorithm is the only possible way to do it.
I make no assumption beyond the one that if you want to index a page you need to know its address and if the author of the website is not going to give it to you because you are not Google and no known website links to it, then you have no way of finding it out. You can't build anything independently. You have to go to Google.
lol, who's using search engines these days ? I bet they don't have enough gpu infra to serve AI search.
> who's using search engines these days
If nothing else, how do you think various LLMs using tools are doing their web searching?
Besides, plenty of people resort to traditional searches for various reasons, often because LLMs aren't happy to talk about any topic, while search engines usually lets you search for pretty much whatever you want.
People who do not want to read and trust the slop that whatever LLM du jour is regurgitating after calling out to said search engines.
Humans are already unfortunately prone to bullshitting and bloviating, but they are also used to dealing with other humans: there's no need to add an additional layer of both from a black box which does not behave like one.