Qwant and Ecosia to make their own search index

[Brad]

Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/11/ecosia-and-qwant-two-european-search-engines-join-forces-on-building-an-index-to-shrink-reliance-on-big-tech/

1. I'll believe it when I see it.
2. Ecosia gets 20 million queries per mo.  Qwant gets 6 million.
3. MS/Bing raising price on Bing API is driving a lot of this.
4. Plan: first they will tackle French lang sites, then add German.  English will be the third lang they add - sometime.
5. Qwant was supposed to be building their own index over all these years but that seems to have stalled.
6. Lots of razzle dazzle about about AI LLM to obfuscate questions about actually doing the work of crawling.
7. Qwant sounds like the lead partner in this. Heh.
8. Lots of tap dancing about building new engine from ground up.  Okay. Heh.
9. Tech Crunch does interview Brave search, some interesting tidbits there.
10. Not one mention of Mojeek.

[Seirdy]

The irony of Ecosia, of all options, going all-in on LLMs.

[Brad]

The irony of Ecosia, of all options, going all-in on LLMs.

Part of this is LLM's are the buzz word of the day.  They fear the Press won't pick up on their press releases unless they throw in "AI" or "LLM".  Personally, I suspect Qwant is teaming with Ecosia to help lure in big fat German government grants, because technology-wise I don't see what Ecosia brings to the partnership other than a good reputation which Qwant does not have.  (Qwant is a bit dodgy IMHO.)