- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
Look… Doesn’t that feel kind of like self-pitying rot to anyone here? Why are we dependent on US technology? Because we are so ethical and pure…
Here’s the truth.
In the late 90s, a German student created a search engine in Germany. It was a little thing. It only scraped a few hundred media outlets. You signed up, defined some keywords, and when an article matching those keywords was published, you received a notification.
He immediately was sued and forced to shut down under copyright law. Google could operate in the US under Fair Use.
Eventually, years later search engines were legalized in Germany (and the EU). But by then the Internet was dominated by US companies. It makes no sense to spend billions to build a European Google that does exactly what Google already does.
The reason that there is no European Google is that we insist that information must be owned. No data processing without the explicit consent of the owner. Which means, we insist that some intellectual property owners should be allowed to extract rent from us all.
There’s actually pretty many to choose from.
Ones I’ve tried:
-
https://www.ecosia.org/ (🇩🇪) I’ve found this to work best for me
-
https://www.qwant.com/ (🇫🇷) also good, but I find the ads sometimes too distracting
-
https://www.startpage.com/ (🇳🇱) also good
others:
- https://www.mojeek.com/ (🇬🇧) if you like the brits… but really, who does?! 😅
- https://good-search.org/ (🇩🇪) interesting
- https://swisscows.com/ (🇨🇭) lol
Honestly, just switch your default search engine in your phone-settings and see what happens. After a while you don’t even realize you’re not using Google anymore. And if you’re not pleased with the search result (which I rarely am these days, using ecosia) see if Google gives a better answer. Mostly not. Happy experimenting! ;)
These are definitely preferable to using straight Google but some of these use Google/Bing to get search results. I’m not sure of the others but Ecosia use Google/Bing for their results and Startpage uses Google. Quant does seem to use their own index but it seems like it was built partially off bing when they first started off. Again, not sure about the others if they have their own index.
PS: What’s wrong with Brits?
Ecosia and Qwant will cooperate and build their own search index.
They left the union
-
Because a couple of years ago everyone thought it was stupid to consider needing one.
Probably a big part of it is the internet emerged from the USA and Silicon Valley already was a strong tech hub in the 90s when it really started becoming worldwide. Back in the 80s and into the early 90s UK used to also to have a pretty big concentration of talent but for some reason that started going away as the 90s progressed.
You are correct, although www was created by a Brit in Switzerland.
Ecosia and Qwant are trying to change that, but it’s an uphill fight.
Because, generally speaking, Europe has this thing called laws, and the government arguably exists to protect it’s “citizens”.
In the US you have this thing called lobbyists and the government unilaterally exists, only to protect it’s “corporations”
For example, in Europe McDonald’s French fries contain 3 ingredients (potato, salt, oil) and in the US there are around 20 ingredients… The US adds all that extra shit to make the frier oil last longer, to make it easier to clean, etc. and fuck you for being poor if it gives you cancer.
Europe has better frameworks in place to prevent robber barons, this is just as true for the digital age as it was 200 years ago.
No, it has better frameworks to regulate local companies but seems to give a free pass to international conglomerates that come in and avoid tax by off shoring it in other EU states. The EU has allowed the US tech companies in on an uneven playing field and they have obliterated EU tech companies, with Ireland in particular taking the proverbial by enticing them with low taxes to benefit it’s own economy.
This was also perhaps tolerated as it was believed the US and EU were close and Europe benefited in other ways from the open trade with the US. Now it looks very short sighted and foolish. When Europe does try to regulate the big US tech companies, the US - not just Trump - objects and undermines it.
The question here is why weren’t Google and the Mac and eBay all originally invented in Europe. Not why don’t the tech barons of 2026 all live in Europe.
The question is even more pointed because some of the people who invented the above were immigrants from Europe. Why did they have to leave to do their world-changing work?
Google was world-changing before it was the big tech nightmare it is today. So stop hiding behind the glory of GDPR and face the actual question.
For example, in Europe McDonald’s French fries contain 3 ingredients (potato, salt, oil) and in the US there are around 20 ingredients… The US adds all that extra shit to make the frier oil last longer, to make it easier to clean, etc. and fuck you for being poor if it gives you cancer.
That’s actually a very poor example because the US and Europe have very different regulatory frameworks. The US actually requires more details when listing ingredients than Europea does.
There is a bigger picture here. Food in America is using ingredients that is not allowed in the EU because its seen as toxic. That is what the focus should stay on i think.
That’s actually a very poor example because the US and Europe have very different regulatory frameworks. The US actually requires more details when listing ingredients than Europea does.
In the EU you must list all ingredients in your product. Ordered by what it has the most.
And in the US you must list all ingredients and all contents of those ingredients, as well as any and all additives (like extra iron, vitamins and so on, even if those come from “natural” sources). You can’t just say potato, salt, oil, you have to say:
Doesn’t mean you get different shit, just means they scrutinize it a lot more in the US. There are small differences here and there with stuff like food colouring, but you are not getting “just 3 ingredients in the EU and 99 in the US”, that’s just a bullshit grifter line being repeated by people who didn’t bother to actually read.
in the uk, the ingredients list for mcd french fries is literally potatoes, oils (rapeseed, sunflower), dextrose (when needed–i.e. early crops that are low in naturally-occurring sugars). salt added after cooking. source
very much different than what they use in the u.s., which introduces multiple allergens. source
😂😂
Because Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu already exist.
Any new competition starting up now would need really deep pockets to compete for the decade or so it would take to make any sort of profit.
There is https://openwebsearch.eu/ which might kickstart things a bit and many do not know about, but your point still stands.
Its a eu funded effort to have a open index others could use and build upon. Dashboard and Crawling Status: https://openwebindex.eu/ Experimental Search Engine: https://ourrs.eu/
One other hurdle to note specifically in this time: because of the absolute flood of AI bots that tend to hammer popular sites and ignore robots.txt, many web servers out there have moved to a bot allow list — which means if you’ve got a new properly behaved and reporting index bot, you’ll likely find it gets blocked by default on a LOT of the Internet.
Thanks for sharing links to this project.
I’ve always been kind of curious, why their wasn’t an OSS possibility to “download” chunks of aggregated search content.
I know that technically it would be a challenge, but forcing crawler after crawler to fetch the exact same content (again and again), is also rather inefficient.
Qwant (french) got its own indexing.
Edit: the linked article isn’t about search engines but big tech companies.
Ecosia (Germany) does too. They work together with Qwant on that.
Both don’t exclusively use their own indexing, and still depend on Google and Bing for part of their results. But you have to start somewhere
and they’re both equally shit because they both use AI fuckery. To stop US tech aggression, we need to ban their weapons (AI) as well!
What makes you think they use US ai? And even if they do it’s surely just a stopgap till they make their pwn. And and all the search engines have a way to turn off ai in your searches. And and and this is the type of purity test that prevents progress from happening
Qwant is fricken awesome, it’s as good as and sometimes even better than Google
Anyone able to chime in on differences with Ecosia?
They plant trees
Is strongly disagree. I have it set as my main web search but it’s often so bad that I have to jump to Google or something else, which I don’t want to do. The only modern truly great one I’ve used in Kagi, but since it’s US based and not free I don’t use it.
100% UK based and unlike Startpage and Qwant . . .uses 100% it’s own crawlers.
Be warned: you will NOT get the same results as Google, Bing, Startpage . . Sometimes that’s helpful . . sometimes not.
I’ve been using it for a couple of months and while I agree the results can sometimes be interesting to compare I think it seems more primitive and result quality worse to the point that I have to go to other searches relatively often. It isn’t as smart about my native language and is only able to search for the exact word typed instead of different variants of it for example.
It’s because creating a system that supports start ups and investment in them is hard. Creating one that also protects citizens is even harder. You need to strike the right balance between regulation and letting companies do what they want. You need to offer right protections for investors. You need fast working, predictable legal system. Doing all this is difficult and many countries are not great at it. EU is not great at it. US managed to do it.
For example, one of very promising EU startups, Gowex, turned out to be total scam. The laws in Spain, weak control mechanism and reporting requirements allowed it to mislead investors for years. When it collapsed a lot of people lost a lot of money and investment in startups in EU slowed down. The regulations simply weren’t good enough.
Courts operate faster and more consistent in system based on common low. That’s why UK was the financial capital of Europe (until brexit) and that’s why US was able to develop huge corporations.
In EU for a long time most companies were financed by banks. There were simply not many tools to get investment from other sources.
All this combines means that EU was a slowly moving but stable market that was good at creating regulations protected citizens but not so good at protecting investors. US on the other hand had a system great at protecting investors while completely ignoring its citizens. That’s why.
EU is not great at it. US managed to do it.
If you ignore the “protecting the citizens” part.
Of course, US did the right thing for businesses. EU is trying to find a balance. The important thing is that US did not simply stand back while businesses did whatever they wanted to. There was regulation and oversight but only the kind that helps corporations, not citizens.
Big techs are a problem. Should we worry that Europe does not have this problem at home?
Everything would be better if we had many smaller companies and organizations doing this stuff instead of just a few, but huge.
Or a few big open standards and many competing implementations.
https://www.startpage.com/ is based in the Netherlands, works really well too in my opinion. I’ve been using it ever since I started actively avoiding Google.
Edit: One caveat is that it’s majorly owned by an American parent company.
My understanding is that this is basically just presenting Google results. Certainly better for privacy but doesn’t do much for tech sovereignty.
I always wonder what people actually mean by „European Google“ because every single Google service already has a European equivalent, some of which are very popular already like Proton Mail.
Because Europe was complacent and never imagined the US and big tech would become so fucking unhinged.
Although looking back, the door started to squeak decades ago.
Use searx and host it yourself, then it’s also ‘European based’
well searx is just metasearch so you still depend on whatever you’re getting the results from.
