They have taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment.
If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly.
Ecosia looks a lot better at first sight. No obvious ties to traditional media and they make no secret out of their political affiliations. Yet, I doubt they are profitable. I have no energy today to go down that rabbit hole but I'd like to see where their money really comes from.
The Axel Springer-Verlag (Publisher) is nothing to be toying around with and accepting money from them is like making a deal with the devil. They own the news from the entire range of lower working class up to the upper middle class and have no hesitation in using those channels to brainwash those targets with the political views which Mathias Döpfner wants to be seen spread.
Second to none in Germany, but probably normal in the US.
Qwant is infamous in France for having made big claims and failed repeatedly. It was for the longest time just a wrapper around Bing, while claiming otherwise.
Ecosia is a non-profit, so being profitable is not their mission.
Each month they publish a breakdown of their expenses and donations. In January they got around 4 million euros, so I’d say they are certainly successful at what they do.
> Ecosia is a non-profit, so being profitable is not their mission.
So was OpenAI, but people develop amazingly flexible morals when someone throws big $$$ at them. Not saying this will happen to Ecosia, I wish them all the best, but at this point I have zero trust in promises and statements like "we'll never do X".
Again, that's not to say they are unscrupulous, they might have the best intentions of "never doing X", but such promises are extremely difficult to keep if they ever become a huge success.
> If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly.
Your sentence seems to imply that Cliqz was collecting "[the] data" like American companies (which companies? Which data?). Can you clarify what you are referring to?
At this point, basically most of my searches on the web are either through brave search, or on Google followed by "... Reddit". At least in the not so distant past, I've found qwant to be slightly worse than google
Qwant is led by one of the most questionable CEO in France. Driven by pure ego and bad management. Instead of building one good product (search), they tried to compete with almost everyone, and especially with every Google products (qwant mail, qwant maps, qwant music, etc.)
thx for reminding me. The Cliqz story was absolutely insane. I think they burnt over 100 mio euros for basically nothing. They had no strategy whatsoever.
So... why would you be more careful with that than Google or Bing? No matter what search engine you use, you will have a company with their agenda behind it.
In the meantime, the German-based GOOD search engine [0] might be alternative. It uses Brave’s independent search index, which according to [1] was also largely developed in Germany.
Hi, the Brave search feed is largely based on the ground work of the former Munich-based German startup Cliqz, whose technology formed the basis of Brave Search. We as a German purpose enterprise seek to work with best independent technologies and currently focus on Brave Search. We can also access UK-based Mojeek and we are in touch with the Qwant/Ecosia startup who will likely have another independent search feed ready in French mid 2025, and in German possibly early 2026 (it's a guess though).
Andreas, Co-Founder GOOD Search
Yandex is also pretty good, they have their own index and it's a lot better than Google on political stuff (as long as the news isn't too recent) and any sort of torrent site.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention! I've been considering switching to Kagi because paying for a service if I don't want to get advertisements just seems like the reasonable thing to do, but I also wanted to reduce my dependence on US companies.
GOOD charges €2/month for unlimited search. I wonder why their costs are so much lower than Kagi's. Maybe Brace's pricing for their index is much cheaper than building your own?
Hi, our 2€/month is indeed a low-entry. About 20% of our users pay voluntarily more to support our mission. As a social enterprise, we do not want to make profits on the subscription, but rather keep it low-cost or support our mission. In the end, it's a mixed calculation, which largely depends on how many searches an average users does (we assume around 80). By the way, Kagi has not built an own index; their model is pretty close to ours.
Excellent news! Europe obviously has good reasons to try and remove reliance on US tech/goods right now, but even ignoring this, it's really positive that the small world of search indexes is growing.
It's probably not controversial to say that search has stagnated a little lately, hopeful more competition will improve things for everyone.
I am not so helpful and exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.
Qwant at its launch was immensely performant and they had the beautiful “lite.qwant.com” same as DuckDuckGo lite, but eventually they deprecated that and bloated the homepage.
Ecosia was also less cluttered and performant, now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website or something and has more ads.
What I think will eventually happen is, both will collaborate and build the next generation of previous Yahoo! and fail.
> now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website
The front page, yeah, maybe. If you use the search directly from the browser you just get a clean looking results page. As for the ads, still WAAAY less than Google.
That's not to say that it can't improve, but I'm not really seeing anyone doing it better currently.
I think something like this could be the “the” web search future. Open or Openish search engines banding together to provide an open and free (as in free beer, yes!) search experience with a common source/index. Maybe DDG and Brave should join as well (ie get involved directly).
While something like Kagi is nice, at best they can become a bespoke and expensive, and maybe excellent as well, suit maker on an experience stretch of a very expensive city. I don’t think general search is that.
I'm using Kagi (and really loving it - when I have to go back to Google which I rarely do nowadays, I'm really shocked by the terrible noise/signal ratio) - and watching their business with interest.
It seems to me that there are always spaces in a market for companies that aren't necessarily looking for world domination in a segment, but just want a sustainable business which does their thing pretty well. ie - Kagi doesn't have to be The Google Killer, it just has to work well enough that people like me give them money and like what they get in return.
Kagi became profitable in 2024 after 2 years of business, and that's even with the (probably considerable?) (current) costs of using Google's index. If they carry on being a niche business, but one that continues to grow (currently 41k members [0]) then that works nicely for me, and presumably lots of other people like me. They don't have to be "general search", they just have to be good enough that people pay for it.
In fact, Kagi benefits enormously from being small enough that no one is SEOing for them. Google's adversarial game of algorithmic whack-a-mole is very expensive and hard to keep up. Kagi doesn't have to play the game because they're not a target.
> It seems to me that there are always spaces in a market for companies that aren't necessarily looking for world domination in a segment, but just want a sustainable business which does their thing pretty well.
Yes, this is what constitutes between 99% and 100% of the world economy.
There’s been dozens of attempts at this that have all failed because there’s no real market demand for it. “Open source” is not a feature in most cases.
What exactly would this do that is an unmet need of enough users to make it worthwhile?
I think it’s definitely seen as one by people who understand it and what it can prevent. Similar to how many people don’t seem to care (or rather don’t think) about privacy until it dawns on them once a lack of privacy bites them.
But you are right that it’s not really a marketable feature for a wide audience.
US interprets "privacy" as against government while allowing unlimited corporate privacy invasion - and in practice quite a large amount of spook privacy invasion through that. EU addresses corporate privacy invasion while having a compromise in law enforcement privacy.
These are proposals, US services are even less trustworthy — since the patriot act at least.
Given the way the US is acting even if the Europeans didn't give a damn about encryption and just wanted to run on a stable, reliable service that isn't going to be suddenly abused for geopolitical purposes, they could do better than choosing services from the US.
It's a good point, but I'm not going to trust a country where the executive branch used data that was supposed to be used for health purposes for criminal investigations (Germany).
The executive branch of the other one arrested someone for using encryption tools and "protecting [himself] against the exploitation of [his] personal data by GAFAM".
Is anyone aware of an AAAA search index? Or a search engine specifically for use on ipv6 (only) networks?
Currently every search engine reachable over ipv6 just returns a lot of unreachable results
Readit News
They have taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment.
If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly.
Ecosia looks a lot better at first sight. No obvious ties to traditional media and they make no secret out of their political affiliations. Yet, I doubt they are profitable. I have no energy today to go down that rabbit hole but I'd like to see where their money really comes from.
Second to none in Germany, but probably normal in the US.
The real question is:
Is Elliot Carver (from James Bond -> Tomorrow Never Dies) based on Mathias Döpfner or Rupert Murdoch?
With a 10% market share? Come on.
So was OpenAI, but people develop amazingly flexible morals when someone throws big $$$ at them. Not saying this will happen to Ecosia, I wish them all the best, but at this point I have zero trust in promises and statements like "we'll never do X".
Again, that's not to say they are unscrupulous, they might have the best intentions of "never doing X", but such promises are extremely difficult to keep if they ever become a huge success.
Your sentence seems to imply that Cliqz was collecting "[the] data" like American companies (which companies? Which data?). Can you clarify what you are referring to?
Disclaimer: I worked at Cliqz
The new owner is Octave Klaba (from OVH).
Dead Comment
[0] https://good-search.org/
[1] https://en.reset.org/the-good-search-engine-web-search-witho...
(Edit: R -> Muscovite)
GOOD charges €2/month for unlimited search. I wonder why their costs are so much lower than Kagi's. Maybe Brace's pricing for their index is much cheaper than building your own?
It's probably not controversial to say that search has stagnated a little lately, hopeful more competition will improve things for everyone.
I hope these Europe-based joint ventures increase in every aspect.
Qwant at its launch was immensely performant and they had the beautiful “lite.qwant.com” same as DuckDuckGo lite, but eventually they deprecated that and bloated the homepage.
Ecosia was also less cluttered and performant, now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website or something and has more ads.
What I think will eventually happen is, both will collaborate and build the next generation of previous Yahoo! and fail.
Definitely does feel that way, their design team needs to change that asap
The front page, yeah, maybe. If you use the search directly from the browser you just get a clean looking results page. As for the ads, still WAAAY less than Google.
That's not to say that it can't improve, but I'm not really seeing anyone doing it better currently.
Well this is the old article (maybe not 6 but few months).
While something like Kagi is nice, at best they can become a bespoke and expensive, and maybe excellent as well, suit maker on an experience stretch of a very expensive city. I don’t think general search is that.
It seems to me that there are always spaces in a market for companies that aren't necessarily looking for world domination in a segment, but just want a sustainable business which does their thing pretty well. ie - Kagi doesn't have to be The Google Killer, it just has to work well enough that people like me give them money and like what they get in return.
Kagi became profitable in 2024 after 2 years of business, and that's even with the (probably considerable?) (current) costs of using Google's index. If they carry on being a niche business, but one that continues to grow (currently 41k members [0]) then that works nicely for me, and presumably lots of other people like me. They don't have to be "general search", they just have to be good enough that people pay for it.
[0] https://kagi.com/stats
Yes, this is what constitutes between 99% and 100% of the world economy.
There’s been dozens of attempts at this that have all failed because there’s no real market demand for it. “Open source” is not a feature in most cases.
What exactly would this do that is an unmet need of enough users to make it worthwhile?
I think it’s definitely seen as one by people who understand it and what it can prevent. Similar to how many people don’t seem to care (or rather don’t think) about privacy until it dawns on them once a lack of privacy bites them.
But you are right that it’s not really a marketable feature for a wide audience.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-e...
[2]: https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o...
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275795
[1]: https://metro.co.uk/2022/01/12/german-police-tracked-down-re...
Given the way the US is acting even if the Europeans didn't give a damn about encryption and just wanted to run on a stable, reliable service that isn't going to be suddenly abused for geopolitical purposes, they could do better than choosing services from the US.
The executive branch of the other one arrested someone for using encryption tools and "protecting [himself] against the exploitation of [his] personal data by GAFAM".