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.
Yes. Next step, public and essential services must work through a website and not require mobile apps that are only available on Google and Apple app stores. This will ensure a level playing field for new competitors. Otherwise, they already lost before even starting.
Next next step These Services must offer Public APIs for third Party Provider to Connect. Imagine a Europe wide train booking Site or similar
I’ve been using Qwant a decent amount lately and it’s definitely better than current day Google. Kagi is also good.
Never tried Qwant, how does it compare to Ecosia or DDG?
Qwant and Ecosia both work together for the european search index. I think when data is missing also both use bing results in a private manner to substitute entries. For the most part Qwant is quite good imo
Never tried Ecosia but I would say it’s better than DDG. Kagi is probably the best though.
I personally switched over to Qwant from Ecosia and have found it to be more consistent. Can’t comment on DDG so much
Just think about how much Google being the default search engine for the EU parliament enabled the USA to spy on the parliament. Everything some MEP searches is going through some NSA data center. And try to imagine how much information the USA can get from that
Tech bros. entering the find out stage.
We were talking about this at lunch today at work, that Qwant is better than Google because Google evil, and Ecosia’s search results are garbage. So several of my colleagues have switched to Qwant. I guess I’ll follow suit. Not sure what to gain from moving from DuckDuckGo though. Qwant has its own index maybe?
Qwant and ecosia are working on their own index which they both draw on, though at least ecosia not completely yet
DDG is still US tech though. If the goal is to use European, DDG is a no-go.
Speaking of US tech, Qwant has Amazon and Adidas as sponsors? 💀 They are prominently displayed on the Qwant front page when using its mobile app…
Take their money, abandon their tech. I’ve been boycotting Amazon for years and I don’t see a problem.
It’s easy for us to say when we never even use the services or products of those companies.
What if it said “Support Genocide” instead. Still, take their money, abandon their cause? It feels very uneasy. No search engine is free, just as no tech offering is truly free.
Absolutely right, I am trying to move away from US tech.
What I absolutely can’t love without is bangs. Like !w <query> to search Wikipedia directly, for example.
But I’m starting to think I might want an add-on for this instead of relying on the search engine for it.
I have heard that they are developing that, but don’t know how much progress there is on it.
Ultimately we need certain internet infrastructure as free public utilities. Like a search engine backend.
free public utilities
I agree, but this will require political will. I think on lemmy people would vote for a government that creates stuff like this, but there are a lot of people want their government to spend as little as possible, unfortunately. I find it more likely we end up with a non-profit like wikipedia provides basic knowledge to the public, free of charge.
Qwant replied 403 to all my requests for like 4 days in a row. Seems to work now for some reason.
Went to duckduckgo. I wish Proton had a search engine.
Ecosia.org works well at least for me, and they also plant trees every 40 searches or something like that, you can get collectables as well
I wish Proton had a search engine.
Guess they are going for the low-hanging fruit first.
Yeah some days Qwant is a bit unreliable, although for me its at most was a few hours. Qwant is my default but I also have other search engines bound in firefox inspired by DDG Bangs (for example !ddg for searching on DuckDuckGo)
Things moving forward, slowly but surely
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
Poor MEPs.
