For many people, search sites are their primary window into the Internet. But at present, the global search market is basically dominated by Google - Google has more than 90% of the global search market share. On Tuesday, two European Internet search companies, Ecosia and Qwant, announced a partnership to jointly build European search indexes to break Google's dominance in the search market.
European search company co-founded
On Tuesday, Ecosia and Qwant agreed to establish a joint venture called European Search Perspective (EUSP), with each party holding a 50% stake. The company will be launched in France in early 2025 and aims to provide "optimized" French and German search results.
Headquartered in Paris, Qwant is a privacy-focused search engine company that promises not to track users or resell their personal data. Headquartered in Berlin, Ecosia's main feature is its focus on environmental protection, promising that for every 50 searches users perform on its platform, they will plant a tree.
Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll said,The collaborative project was made possible in part because of the EU’s new technology-focused competition rules.
Earlier this year, Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into effect. The bill requires large tech companies it classifies as "gatekeepers" to make their platforms more open. For example, under the DMA, Google needs to share its data useful for training search models.
Currently, the top five search engines in the world are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex. Among them, Google's market share accounts for about 90%, almost monopolizing the entire market.
Create an independent search index from scratch
Currently, alternative search engines like Ecosia, Qwant, and DuckDuckGo have not developed their own backend infrastructure and must still rely on existing technology from companies like Microsoft to provide search results.
However, in the new venture, they will build their own search index from scratch, gathering results from different search engines. Ecosia and Qwant say their new search index will be "privacy first," using technology that Qwant is redesigning in 2023.
Qwant CEO Olivier Abecassis said: "We are a European company and we need to build a technology that ensures that decisions by third parties do not jeopardize our business."
"This is not about the United States or American companies, this is just about the sovereignty of our businesses and our companies," he added.
Abekasis will also serve as CEO of the new company, which has yet to raise funds from outside investors.
Ecosia CEO Kroll said last week that Europe is "technically very dependent on the United States." However, geopolitical tensions are likely to intensify following Trump's election as US president, which could pose problems for Europe's dependence on US technology.
He also cited the natural gas supply problem in Europe after the Russia-Ukraine conflict as an example. After the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Russia's natural gas supply to Europe was cut off, causing a huge impact on Europe's energy supply. Clore believes this should be a warning "about what happens when an entire continent becomes too dependent on a single country for a critical resource."