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Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech
Qwant, France's privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and
Kroll also pointed to a regulatory environment in Europe that is keen to foster homegrown tech innovation in order to bolster the bloc’s strategic autonomy as another reason for making a bet on a homebrew search index now. The two firms share a few characteristics that make a partnership look like a good cultural fit, with both search alternatives being developed in Europe and having business models that seek to do something different compared to Big Tech’s standard surveillance capitalism playbook. But with Big Tech more jealously guarding info inside its own platforms these days, as giants compete to monetize user data afresh for training LLMs, this is also complicating the business of trying to get out from under their shadow by indexing the internet for search… From a rock to a hard place, then.
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