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 more than 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.
