Search Engines Ecosia and Qwant Announce New Alliance To Compete Against Google And Bing

Berlin-based search engine Ecosia and French privacy-focused search engine Qwant announced a new partnership to develop a new European search index.

According to TechCrunch, the companies expect to bring innovation with the help of AI and Large Language Models (LLM) to diminish their dependence on American tech companies like Alphabet and Microsoft and their respective search engines Google and Bing. Ecosia and Qwant currently rely on Bing and Google for APIs and results for their products.

“With the emergence of AI tools there is a different demand now for a search index,” said Christian Kroll, Ecosia CEO, to TechCrunch. “The two providers, Bing and Google, are basically getting more reluctant to make their index accessible. And of course, as a search engine, we need an index. So that’s partially why we want to make sure we have access.

According to CNBC, the not-for-profit search engine Ecosia and Qwant agreed on a “privacy-first” policy for the new joint venture called the European Search Perspective (EUSP) in which both share a 50-50 ownership.

The new project is expected to be released during the first quarter of next year in France, where Qwant is headquartered. The companies are taking advantage of the Digital Markets Act which aims to regulate gatekeepers and allow small to mid-size European companies to compete more fairly.

“We are European companies and we need to build technology that makes sure no third-party decision — for instance, Microsoft’s decision to increase costs to access their search API — could jeopardize our business,” said Olivier Abecassis, CEO of Qwant, to CNBC, “It is nothing against the U.S. or U.S. companies. It is all about the sovereignty of our business and companies.” Abecassis will also be the CEO of European Search Perspective.

The search engine market evolving as users are relying more on different ways to access information, from social media to chatbots. OpenAI recently launched its AI-powered search engine, and Perplexity has been working on a new advertising system for its AI search platform.