The European Parliament will this week replace Google with France’s Qwant – a European alternative search engine – as the default on its computers, according to an email seen by Euractiv.
The European Parliament will this week replace Google with France’s Qwant – a European alternative search engine – as the default on its computers, according to an email seen by Euractiv.
Partly owned by German nazi media house Springer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
Personally I pay for https://metager.org/ , they don’t have their own index (something the EU with their open index will hopefully solve in the future) but apart from their image search being completely shite I have no complaints.
Springer is right wing but I think its a bit much to call them Nazi. Also 20% ownership doesn’t mean they run the company
I’m not sure which open index the EU is planning on using but I sure hope it’s not the Open Web Index because when I last had to use that it turns out that they forgot to embed the links that were contained in the texts they scanned
As for why that’s bad: hyperlinks are basically THE best way to figure out which content is relevant compared to other content. PageRank, the algorithm that got Google famous, is based on articles linking to each other to figure out which articles are the most valuable (it’s the articles that the most people link to, similar to how in science, the most important papers are usually the ones with the most citations). Open Web Index doesn’t have any of that information, it’s all just text, combined with the link where the crawler scanned that text