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

Qwant, a French privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine, are partnering to develop their own European search index. The move aims to reduce their dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft and Google, and to drive innovation in their respective search engines, particularly around generative AI. The new joint venture, called European Search Perspective, will lower their operational costs and serve as a technical base for their own product development.

The search index is expected to start serving France-based search engine traffic for Ecosia and Qwant by the first quarter of next year, and expand to include a significant portion of traffic in Germany by the end of 2025. The partnership is also open to other European firms joining in their push for more tech stack sovereignty. The venture will be headquartered in Paris, with Qwant's engineering team moving to the new entity.

Key takeaways:

Qwant and Ecosia, two European search engines, are partnering to develop their own search index to reduce dependence on tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
The joint venture, named European Search Perspective (EUP), aims to drive innovation in their search engines, particularly around generative AI, and lower operational costs.
The search index will initially serve France-based traffic for both search engines by the first quarter of next year, with plans to expand to Germany by the end of 2025.
Despite building their own index, both Qwant and Ecosia will continue to use Bing and Google, but aim to diversify the core tech supporting their services with their own index.

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

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