Ask the search engine Ecosia about “Paris to Prague” and flight booking websites dominate the results. Ecosia’s CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to present more train options, which he considers better for the environment. But because its results are licensed from Google and Microsoft’s Bing, Ecosia has little control over what’s shown. Kroll is ready for that to change.
Berlin-based Ecosia, which donates its profits to tree planting, and its Paris-based competitor Qwant are announcing Tuesday that they will team up to develop an index of the web.
The for-profit joint venture, dubbed European Search Perspective and located in Paris, could allow the small companies and any others that decide to join up to reduce their reliance on Google and Bing and serve results that are better tailored to their companies’ missions and Europeans’ tastes. “We could de-rank results from unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” Kroll says of the eco-minded Ecosia.
Losing a bit of licensing revenue won’t be much of a hit to Microsoft or Google, which together own about 95 percent of the global search industry outside China. But at a time when services such as ChatGPT and TikTok are already redefining how users search, tiny rivals potentially becoming more attractive to users could force the bigger companies to accelerate their investments in regional upgrades.
Ownership of European Search Perspective, or EUSP, will be split equally between Ecosia and Qwant, with Ecosia providing cash and data while Qwant supplies the labor. Technical infrastructure will come from OVHcloud, which shares ownership with Qwant. Ecosia has about 1 percent search market share in France and Germany and claims about 20 million users globally, while Qwant reports about 6 million users.
For Ecosia and Qwant, taking on more of the world beyond French- and German-speaking users will require succeeding at home and growing revenue, which largely comes from running ads. The challenge is evident. Ecosia’s sales, according to its disclosures, are down 8 percent to €24.2 million through the first nine months of this year compared to the same period in 2023. More precise results aren’t guaranteed to help boost the business—the ads are still provided by Microsoft and Google. Kroll says that’s going to change anytime soon.
The companies are open to both raising outside funding for EUSP and licensing its index to other companies, including those that might want to use the data to train AI systems. “We’re bringing together the most experienced search engineers to build sovereign tech in Europe—especially for the French and German language, and we’re supremely confident that this will appeal to the investment community,” Kroll says.
Developing an index—identifying all the websites out on the internet and making their contents searchable—is no trivial task. Doing it better than Google, which has honed its approach over decades, is even more daunting.
But Kroll believes tech advances have made affordable indexing more possible and new EU regulations limiting the power of gatekeepers such as Google are making it a worthwhile pursuit. In the past few years, other Google competitors have built their own indexes, including Brave and the now-defunct Neeva.
In some ways, developing an alternative index is now imperative. Bing last year increased the licensing fees it charges to companies such as Eocisa and Qwant, forcing them to recalibrate their offerings.
Ecosia and Qwant expect to begin testing revamped search results in France early next year and in Germany by the end of 2025. Among Google’s achievements in indexing is how quickly it can provide results. Kroll says EUSP aims to reach competitive speeds through testing and tuning. “User experience will not be compromised,” he says.
In a best case scenario for Qwant and Ecosia, they could provide for Europe what Naver has offered in South Korea. Heesoo Jang, an assistant professor of media law and ethics at University of Massachusetts Amherst, says irrelevant and spammy Google results have driven South Korean users away from the service. By some estimates, Naver now accounts for over half of the South Korean search market.
There’s also opportunity for the European search engines to break ground in underserved countries such as Ethiopia. In June, a study by UC Berkeley researchers found that queries in Ethiopian languages such as Amharic on Google’s YouTube for popular but benign topics led to results for sexual content. Researchers say that users described their search experiences as mind boggling and “horrible.” Google has generally held that it’s always working to improve the quality of results and get users their desired content faster.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, one of the study authors, says a search engine tailored toward a particular language isn’t enough. “It’s not just the language that matters but the social identity that shapes them,” she says. Developers have to account for a society’s values, which stem from ethnicity, class, and other factors. With its focus on the environment, Ecosia may already have an edge there.
