> Because it strengthens Europe’s long-term competitiveness, democratic control, and stability.
I don't see the point. What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish? The chat control plans, the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Digital Services Act, the militarization - none of it seems to be democratic tied to any values surrounding freedom.
Chat control is bad, but it was voted out multiple times already, and is fundamentally incompatible with several member states' constitutions (based on a comment, didn't read more into it, but I believe Romania and Germany, among others).
They just try to push it through when people are occupied with something else, which is very unfortunate (and they (who?) should be punished for it, I would want a society that "cancels" these politicians immediately for supporting such an anti-freedom policy), but that's it.
The EU is still a shining beacon of democracy in the world.
> The EU is still a shining beacon of democracy in the world.
The EU as a collection/union of sovereign countries? Sure.
As an organization itself the EU is not particularly democratic or it was every designed to be a democracy. Its entirely by indirect appointees and unelected bureaucrats with minimal supervision..
There are direct elections for the parliament. Those "indirect appointees" are the heads of government of each state, it's as direct as it could possibly get.
And the "unelected bureaucrats" are just... bureaucrats. That's how governments are run the world over, even in places like Switzerland.
Or does your country vote regularly for the Director of Rail Transportation in your Ministry of Transportation? Or the Director of Lower Education in your Ministry of Education?
If your country holds referendums for that, your country is, sorry to inform you, bats**t crazy.
Let's please stop spreading anti EU propaganda and adress real concerns. For example the EU needs a full blown border protection agency and external EU border protection should be a 100% EU matter, not a member state matter. The EU should have a unified digital market. Etc.
Not really, you vote for parties local to your country. You can not vote for EP parties directly.
Anyways, ProtectEU, the new "break all encryption if chatcontrol fails" was proposed by a secret group, whose identities still not known. That's even farer away from a good and democratic institution than unelected bureaucrats.
I don't think calling these anti-EU-propaganda is a good thing, they are valid criticism (even if the EU is mainly a good thing), and they should be addressed at some point in time.
oh yeah, democracy with actual, real kingdoms (10 of them or how many?) kings and constitutions that gives real rights to king. Const. that actually puts king above law and says "sacrosanct".
what democracy? Yeah some of them have it but not EU and all.
I agree that the Chat Control plans are bad, however do you think that particular concern is better handled in China or the US?
Also note they are not the law specifically because of active democracy.
The other points you mentioned I don’t see how they are anti democratic.
When the UK was in the EU, hardly anyone I know voted in the EU elections, and equally they weren't covered by the media. I believe there was so little interest in the EU elections and it felt so far removed from the uk that I'm not sure it really counted as "democratic" (perhaps someone will correct me here?).
I'm hoping voters in European countries feel differently, I suspect not though.
> hardly anyone I know voted in the EU elections, and equally they weren't covered by the media. I believe there was so little interest in the EU elections
The choice about not voting is easily a sign of democracy, than a sign of no democracy. An autocratic system would either prevent people from voting or arrange votes leading to high support.
However there is indeed a problem:
For one the parliament is weak. It has no right if initiative and no right of budget. These rights are with the elected governments of the member states, who control the commission and firm the council. However even those are (if we ignore Hungary and that complexity) democratically elected and can face votes of confidence over their actions (based on national law)
The other big issue are the topics the EU deals with. Those are mostly complex trade related things, where not being an expert or having special interest in a segment hardly interest the people. The "interesting" topics like taxation, health care, education, social benefits, inner security, ... are within national politics. And even topics where EU powers overlap are discussed from national perspective. Which directly leads to the third issue.
EU is multinational and multilingual thing. A commissioner or MEP can give a fabulous speech, but most people only hear a badly dubbed version, partially even with being double translated (first from, say, Bulgarian to German, then from German to Portuguese) which makes it really hard to debate.
Now saying "it's complicated" hiding eyes and turning around is an option, but even Germany itself is too weak to play in the international field against US (especially with the current political situation) or China. If they can't find a common stand, they will not behold against t the big countries. For a few small counties aside, like Switzerland and UK there is some room to benefit from the big neighbor but be special, but Europe falling apart weakens all.
Which is the final point: The EU is the best structure we had in a few millenia where we didn't have all those different countries fighting and going to war, but we're we have defined ways to negotiate, vote and execute decisions. There is lots of room to improve, with different priorities by everybody, but better than other things we had.
It may be imperfect, but having a system controlled by someone you vote for and can ultimately kick out is better than having a system controlled by another country's political apparatus.
I disagree. It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country, then a censored/corrupted service controlled by their own country's government. The former meets the user's requirements, today; the "democracy can fix it!" one is an unrealized promise of the future.
If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
This dilemma might exist if Ecosia was thoroughly censored and corrupted to the point it was completely unfit for purpose, but it isn't, so for now it seems more like a hypothetical concern than a real one.
What is a real concern, however, is the American government influencing world events in ways that materially harms people outside of America. That government retains its power through the ongoing global economic dominance of American companies. Ordinary people can't do much to directly affect global affairs, but they can at least choose where to spend their money, so why wouldn't they choose to spend their money with companies who aren't propping up foreign governments that harm them?
> It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country
This point of view I could have understood 20 years ago, but Snowden revelations happened in 2013. Before that, US social media have always been censored according to US social norms.
Uncensored, un-backdoored services from a foreign country have never existed.
As for sovereignty, considering the current US admin as well as US tech barons have been pushing their horses in several EU elections, it's pretty obvious that services from a foreign country with such policies are an issue.
Kagi user here, but one could argue that there is no such thing as un-backdoored service when the US government can knock at Google's door (kagi uses GCP) and ask the data, with little to no accountability or due process.
So I agree with you, but the premises are quite restrictive.
The European Parliament elects the president of the European Commission, and has to approve the commissioners of the European Commission. The European Council, who proposes the president and appoints the commissioners, is a representation of the governments of the member states, which are democratically elected as well. By electing their governments and the European Parliament, the European citizens ultimately determine who controls the European Commission, as a form of representative democracy.
Militarization is necessary. The other stuff is criminality and not-quite-criminality-but-still-enough-that-we-don't-want-them-anyway by a bunch of 'leaders' who we can hope to eventually oust.
I also like this as a platform for my own ideas. I think search (also RAG) is shit and that we need longer, higher quality vector representations of texts, and if I develop one I could potentially convince the people running this to try it.
While I mostly agree with your raised issues, technically you have mixed up two distinct things: "Europe/European" and EU! "Europe" is larger than the EU and the mentioned European (cultural) values do no necessarily coincide with whatever the EU is doing...
> What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish?
First, the claim is that it strengthens democratic control. I can't see how you could be against that.
Second, the more, the merrier. In this case, more search indices means more search freedom. If your country censors something, you can try another index. But only if that index actually exists, and falls under different rules.
You raise a fair point. Equating 'digital sovereignty' with democracy isn't straightforward, and there’s a risk of it becoming just another technocratic project. But as a step toward diversified infrastructure and more democratic tech, it seems worthwhile to me. It’s also about breaking monopolies and creating alternatives, whether they’re perfect or not.
The quoted part doesn't say anything about "freedom", are you sure that maybe your perspective (coming from the US I guess?) matches with the values Europeans want?
Personally, I want more of my computing, in every sense, to be closer to me. Ideally in Spain, but OK within EU too, so if there are no search indexes run by EU entities, then that's something we should improve.
Its quite entertaining, every week there is a dozen articles where people derive why the DMA was needed from first principles and yet every time someone posts anything remotely approving of the EU there is endless complaints about this.
That is not why people attack the EU, at least that is not why I am personally hostile to it.
I am attcaking it because it has failed to deliver on it's promises. The whole push for digital sovereignty has been going on for years if not decades now and nothing ever materialized.
You can go back to the archives of HN to see how many articles have been shared along the years regarding the EU's attempt to start their own versions of FAANG/MANGA companies.
You can even go back to last year to see when the so called Draghi report was being talked about and see how much progress has been made to address the issues that he raised.
Then there is also the fact that the EU does not miss one occasion to publicly criticize countries that violates human rights like China and Russia all the while it's own commission is trying to exert major control on social media via the DMA and remove privacy for all citizens in Europe in order to "save the children".
Do anyone really think that EU cares about your privacy more than the US?
But when you bring any of these points, the EU supporters come back with, well that's because there is not enough EU. Listening to them, we should all just be happy to be a federation where countries become provinces that are managed by bureaucrats in Brussels.
Now, that may be what certain people want but I am not one of them.
Every time I link someone Ecosia, they always complain that it doesn't have a "clean start page", and I do agree. That, and not having the ability to see less or more of certain pages is why no one I know uses Ecosia.
I don’t use Ecosia, because their marketing messages always have been somewhat deceitful. They claimed "plant tree with your searches", but in reality, if you didn’t click on ads, nothing gets planted.
Totally agree. It doesn't seem limited to EU results btw. I added a bookmark on the toolbar and will be searching there first. Enough already will surveillance capitalism!
Great job, already start using it and looking good. Crawl the f..k out of internet same way all the big techs are doing, at least what´s European stays in EU. The ethics should apply to all equally. Thank you and Viva la France.
If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?
Search engines should be run as utilities. Unfortunately we are now in the stage where utilities (and other must haves such as education) are run as private enterprises.
You say that, but I don't think you actually want that. Utilities are very good for important, slowly changing type things. They ossify into conservative, safe services. Which is good if we're talking about power generation and transmission or water treatment or whatever. Search is still changing way too rapidly.
We do, on the other hand, need better regulation regarding how individual data can be used, collected, and shared, particularly in the US.
Food production doesn't have the same dynamics as search does. There is little value in thousands of small search farmers each indexing their own acre of the Internet space. That's why it should be run as a utility, it's not about importance.
How soon are effects visible? Complete lack of food - days, chronic malnutrition - months or years. Lack of education - decades. Many people are not smart enough to think that far ahead.
Lack of education is also generally desirable to many people in power. Not just politicians who can more easily lie but also managers and execs. If the tax system is beyond most people's understanding, rich people are not gonna get taxed properly. If people can't do the math on how much value their work produces for a company, they are not gonna understand how big a chunk the people above them in hierarchical structures (like most companies) take out of it.
Unlike food, education (or lack of it) doesn't have universal definition. Because of that it's easy to stretch and manipulate. And it's been stretched and manipulated all the time cause possibility to indoctrinate young people creates immense political power. Like with free speech, non-uniform, not strictly state controlled (which implies private) education is a way to prevent state bureaucracy to concentrate too much power. That's not touching the fact that state hierarchies are well known for their inefficiency. Let's be fair, the reason people usually passionately bring education with politics in neighboring sentences is because it's widely accepted that our beliefs are right, and therefore people who stand against them are dumb, and maybe education can lead them (or at least their children) to our embrace! Funny thing, those "our beliefs" are often incompatible, and even opposite. Which makes me think that humanity doesn't work like that really
Current search trends, and which results get clicked for which queries, are still intrinsically valuable. Mostly for the search index signals as you mention, and other things like updating recrawl rates, etc.
Even for established players these have value because the index gets stale quickly for certain queries that many people care about a lot. Even though that value isn't fungible, or enough to break even if it were, it's the kind of value that keeps the search engine competitive.
Vivaldi has a (as private as possible, check their blog) whitelist for click attribution. My guess they refer to ads on search engines on their partner search engine.
It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt.
Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
US solutions are incredibly self-centered. It's very visible to Europeans how American cultural norms completely dominate the digital public sphere. In 2025, this feels dangerous to many of us.
Examples of American cultural attitudes permeating social media platforms that have felt very odd in Europe: Firearms and violence (which is apparently allowed), and nudity (which is apparently always sexual).
The concerns about the current direction of EU regulation are valid and huge, I get that.
What's more surprising to me (also EU citizen) is how readily able we are to adopt US cultural norms to our own.
The most glaring and obvious example is the narrative surrounding race/gender relations. The EU has it's own racial issues but we get BLM riots too and we get chest thumping misandrists in Sweden.. the country that has done the most to promote gender equality of any nation on the planet.
BLM riots don't make sense in the UK for example, our race relations are much more nuanced, difficult, and probably put the Pakistani community in the most visibly disadvantaged position; but there's no space to talk about that as we're discussing George Floyd and police brutality (which, largely is not a UK issue at all).
I know for Americans this might come off as tone deaf because everything over there is so polarised it's like a battle to the death; but I think a major reason the right wing is growing in the EU is because of US cultural norms becoming prevalent (individualism over collectivism) and that naturally comes with some amount of xenophobia; as if you're living an individualistic mindset you naturally see resources as zero-sum.
The growth of right-wing movements thrive, ironically, by positioning themselves as a bulwark against what they frame as foreign cultural encroachment. It seems we're stuck trying to choose between a censored European world or an American one that doesn't fit us at all.
But if I have to choose, I choose the one that actually sort of fits.
Denmark have in the past few elections had a guy run on the promise of reinstating the Glass–Steagall Act. No word on how a Dane, in the Danish parliament would even be in a position of reintroducing a US law.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people around you adopt US mentality, problems and problem solving. This can be simple things like talking to the police, ignoring the fact that there's a huge difference in talking to a police officer in Gothenburg vs. Baltimore. Some times you even run into people protesting something that's not a problem, but US centric social media has lead them to believe it is. At the same time many are completely oblivious to local issues.
Clearly, American social platforms are the vehicles to deliver this division, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that the message is being equally engineered and promoted by other powers as well (Russia and China as a bare minimum, from the top of recently documented elections interferences).
That's not to absolve Americans at all, but rather to reinforce the idea that the EU should reign over those platforms in the EU, and/or promote its own.
I can't talk about other countries, but in France it's clear that liberals (which in my books are right wing) try to emulate the US and capture more traditional movements/struggles.
Liberal 'feminists' borrowing the US word 'empowerment' to replace the word 'emancipation', and their new feminist dream is to be a CEO instead of finding a way to smoothen or remove hierarchical structures. Beauvoir is radically reinterpreted, and d'Eaubonne forgotten.
What's funny is that most movements on the right of liberals are becoming even more US coded (all beside one in the regular right, and all beside Monarchist and Bonapartists on the far right) , enough to forget even _very recent_ memories, because they want to transform my country into the US so much. Manifesting transformism shows while transformists were not a subject for almost a century (and Michou died less than a decade ago) is peak American (which isn't an issue if you're from the US to be clear). A more anecdotal example: my mother and aunts are catholic and go to every local church event, at least since their sister died. A lot of (mostly young) people converted recently and those neo-catholic act like Puritains, like they were in a TV show. Calling Yoga devil's work and other shit like that. The priests are trying to do something because apparently it became unbearable.
I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
> I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
Our local right-wingers want to shut down our equivalent to the education department because “they are too woke”. Meanwhile those same “nationalists” want to stop funding local culture in favor of importing US culture.
This is in Finland of all places. I’m tired of our local social media drones going crazy over US nonsense but our right-wing parties want more of it.
The global cultural influence of the US is really showing and it’s going to be a wild ride as the world shifts to reject it as that influence starts turning against us.
Woke ideology is a rebranding of social democracy and egalitarian humanism, and certainly not invented in US.
What is American is the endless need to slap a scary label on it, turn it into a culture war football, and export the outrage everywhere else. We’ve been talking about equality, workers' rights, and anti-discrimination in Europe for over a century without needing Fox News to tell us it's dangerous. Now suddenly our own politicians are parroting this imported panic as if it were homegrown wisdom.
With the Internet it takes just a few seconds of searching and reading to find that traditional Nordic / European social democracy is not the roots of modern "woke" ideology.
Especially when it comes to all the main doctrines of woke ideology concerning race and ethnicity, sexuality, immigration, labor and drug use.
It’s great to have US offerings, but when US offerings become extreme self-centered as US offerings tend to be, I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the oligarch‘s profits and feelings” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
That was remarkably fast, even if it only covers a subset of French searches. I love Ecosia, but I half expected this to be more an PR announcement when it was first presented, not that they'd actually deliver anything, and certainly not so fast.
First, the results seem really good. Definitely better than Bing. Remember the old days when g**gle came out and it seemed amazing? A little like that.
Second, I read their blog. Critical thinking and reading helps one recognize BS.
Now the question is typically HN with no answer "proof". One can dive down a HN sub bullet tree with this. It's something like proving you exist. Nothing definitive there!
Qwant has taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment.
At least on the outset Ecosia seemed to resist to be drawn into traditional media and their interests quite well until now, but them working together with Qwant is not a good sign.
How do you even build a search index today when websites barely link to each other?
Nowadays the bulk of linking goes to ecommerce sites (amazon) from content farms (reddit) and all those sites are submitted directly to Google. I don't think crawlable internet exists anymore.
You can start with seeds like common crawl, and go from there. You can also get DNS records from various providers. Then there's SSL cert logs that you can crawl. Plenty of sources, if you have funding (search by itself without ads sponsoring it might be a net loss, except some niche uses like kagi?)
It isn't impossible nowadays to enumerate domain names using DNS data and score them based on the content they serve. Isn't that what we really want as users? Scoring based not on proxies for relevance like referral count, but on viewable content?
It's possible indeed as I'm doing it for another reason (monitoring sovereigty).
You can ask Icann [0] access to gTld domain list files (if you have a legitimate reason to do so). Once access you are granted access to a gTld, you can download a compressed csv file with a line per couple <domain, nameserver>.
I make no assumption beyond the one that if you want to index a page you need to know its address and if the author of the website is not going to give it to you because you are not Google and no known website links to it, then you have no way of finding it out. You can't build anything independently. You have to go to Google.
> Because it strengthens Europe’s long-term competitiveness, democratic control, and stability.
I don't see the point. What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish? The chat control plans, the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Digital Services Act, the militarization - none of it seems to be democratic tied to any values surrounding freedom.
Chat control is bad, but it was voted out multiple times already, and is fundamentally incompatible with several member states' constitutions (based on a comment, didn't read more into it, but I believe Romania and Germany, among others).
They just try to push it through when people are occupied with something else, which is very unfortunate (and they (who?) should be punished for it, I would want a society that "cancels" these politicians immediately for supporting such an anti-freedom policy), but that's it.
The EU is still a shining beacon of democracy in the world.
> Chat control is bad, but it was voted out multiple times already
It’s gaining momentum again, so let’s not rest on past victories.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-2b-dual-tranche-note...
I do agree with your overall point.
> The EU is still a shining beacon of democracy in the world.
The EU as a collection/union of sovereign countries? Sure.
As an organization itself the EU is not particularly democratic or it was every designed to be a democracy. Its entirely by indirect appointees and unelected bureaucrats with minimal supervision..
There are direct elections for the parliament. Those "indirect appointees" are the heads of government of each state, it's as direct as it could possibly get.
And the "unelected bureaucrats" are just... bureaucrats. That's how governments are run the world over, even in places like Switzerland.
Or does your country vote regularly for the Director of Rail Transportation in your Ministry of Transportation? Or the Director of Lower Education in your Ministry of Education?
If your country holds referendums for that, your country is, sorry to inform you, bats**t crazy.
Let's please stop spreading anti EU propaganda and adress real concerns. For example the EU needs a full blown border protection agency and external EU border protection should be a 100% EU matter, not a member state matter. The EU should have a unified digital market. Etc.
> There are direct elections for the parliament.
Not really, you vote for parties local to your country. You can not vote for EP parties directly.
Anyways, ProtectEU, the new "break all encryption if chatcontrol fails" was proposed by a secret group, whose identities still not known. That's even farer away from a good and democratic institution than unelected bureaucrats.
I don't think calling these anti-EU-propaganda is a good thing, they are valid criticism (even if the EU is mainly a good thing), and they should be addressed at some point in time.
oh yeah, democracy with actual, real kingdoms (10 of them or how many?) kings and constitutions that gives real rights to king. Const. that actually puts king above law and says "sacrosanct".
what democracy? Yeah some of them have it but not EU and all.
Most are constitutional monarchies in which the monarch is a head of state with no or very limited political power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchies_in_Europe
Not most, all EU member monarchies are constitutional monarchies.
Give me the name of any country - and I'll tell you why it is not really a democracy.
There's so many actual reasons to complain about lack of democracy at the EU level; constitutional monarchies are certainly not one of them.
Are you being completely honest here?
I agree that the Chat Control plans are bad, however do you think that particular concern is better handled in China or the US? Also note they are not the law specifically because of active democracy.
The other points you mentioned I don’t see how they are anti democratic.
For me as a European despite all the flaws it gives me more democratic influence than America or China. There i got no vote at all.
And then, in a global comparison EU isn't that bad for what it is - a union of independent countries with quite different culture and history.
When the UK was in the EU, hardly anyone I know voted in the EU elections, and equally they weren't covered by the media. I believe there was so little interest in the EU elections and it felt so far removed from the uk that I'm not sure it really counted as "democratic" (perhaps someone will correct me here?).
I'm hoping voters in European countries feel differently, I suspect not though.
> hardly anyone I know voted in the EU elections, and equally they weren't covered by the media. I believe there was so little interest in the EU elections
The choice about not voting is easily a sign of democracy, than a sign of no democracy. An autocratic system would either prevent people from voting or arrange votes leading to high support.
However there is indeed a problem:
For one the parliament is weak. It has no right if initiative and no right of budget. These rights are with the elected governments of the member states, who control the commission and firm the council. However even those are (if we ignore Hungary and that complexity) democratically elected and can face votes of confidence over their actions (based on national law)
The other big issue are the topics the EU deals with. Those are mostly complex trade related things, where not being an expert or having special interest in a segment hardly interest the people. The "interesting" topics like taxation, health care, education, social benefits, inner security, ... are within national politics. And even topics where EU powers overlap are discussed from national perspective. Which directly leads to the third issue.
EU is multinational and multilingual thing. A commissioner or MEP can give a fabulous speech, but most people only hear a badly dubbed version, partially even with being double translated (first from, say, Bulgarian to German, then from German to Portuguese) which makes it really hard to debate.
Now saying "it's complicated" hiding eyes and turning around is an option, but even Germany itself is too weak to play in the international field against US (especially with the current political situation) or China. If they can't find a common stand, they will not behold against t the big countries. For a few small counties aside, like Switzerland and UK there is some room to benefit from the big neighbor but be special, but Europe falling apart weakens all.
Which is the final point: The EU is the best structure we had in a few millenia where we didn't have all those different countries fighting and going to war, but we're we have defined ways to negotiate, vote and execute decisions. There is lots of room to improve, with different priorities by everybody, but better than other things we had.
It may be imperfect, but having a system controlled by someone you vote for and can ultimately kick out is better than having a system controlled by another country's political apparatus.
I disagree. It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country, then a censored/corrupted service controlled by their own country's government. The former meets the user's requirements, today; the "democracy can fix it!" one is an unrealized promise of the future.
If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
This dilemma might exist if Ecosia was thoroughly censored and corrupted to the point it was completely unfit for purpose, but it isn't, so for now it seems more like a hypothetical concern than a real one.
What is a real concern, however, is the American government influencing world events in ways that materially harms people outside of America. That government retains its power through the ongoing global economic dominance of American companies. Ordinary people can't do much to directly affect global affairs, but they can at least choose where to spend their money, so why wouldn't they choose to spend their money with companies who aren't propping up foreign governments that harm them?
Materially harms people inside of America too.
> It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country
This point of view I could have understood 20 years ago, but Snowden revelations happened in 2013. Before that, US social media have always been censored according to US social norms.
Uncensored, un-backdoored services from a foreign country have never existed.
As for sovereignty, considering the current US admin as well as US tech barons have been pushing their horses in several EU elections, it's pretty obvious that services from a foreign country with such policies are an issue.
Kagi user here, but one could argue that there is no such thing as un-backdoored service when the US government can knock at Google's door (kagi uses GCP) and ask the data, with little to no accountability or due process.
So I agree with you, but the premises are quite restrictive.
The European commission cannot be kicked out so your point is invalid.
The European Parliament elects the president of the European Commission, and has to approve the commissioners of the European Commission. The European Council, who proposes the president and appoints the commissioners, is a representation of the governments of the member states, which are democratically elected as well. By electing their governments and the European Parliament, the European citizens ultimately determine who controls the European Commission, as a form of representative democracy.
Militarization is necessary. The other stuff is criminality and not-quite-criminality-but-still-enough-that-we-don't-want-them-anyway by a bunch of 'leaders' who we can hope to eventually oust.
I also like this as a platform for my own ideas. I think search (also RAG) is shit and that we need longer, higher quality vector representations of texts, and if I develop one I could potentially convince the people running this to try it.
While I mostly agree with your raised issues, technically you have mixed up two distinct things: "Europe/European" and EU! "Europe" is larger than the EU and the mentioned European (cultural) values do no necessarily coincide with whatever the EU is doing...
> What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish?
First, the claim is that it strengthens democratic control. I can't see how you could be against that.
Second, the more, the merrier. In this case, more search indices means more search freedom. If your country censors something, you can try another index. But only if that index actually exists, and falls under different rules.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Europe has its flaws but it's still the best game in town.
You raise a fair point. Equating 'digital sovereignty' with democracy isn't straightforward, and there’s a risk of it becoming just another technocratic project. But as a step toward diversified infrastructure and more democratic tech, it seems worthwhile to me. It’s also about breaking monopolies and creating alternatives, whether they’re perfect or not.
> to any values surrounding freedom
The quoted part doesn't say anything about "freedom", are you sure that maybe your perspective (coming from the US I guess?) matches with the values Europeans want?
Personally, I want more of my computing, in every sense, to be closer to me. Ideally in Spain, but OK within EU too, so if there are no search indexes run by EU entities, then that's something we should improve.
The militarization of Europe is not tied to any value surrounding freedom? I’m sorry but have you been sleeping under a rock?
You have a point but he does too.
Without you own search engines (or tech companies in general) you depend on third parties and become basically a puppet.
The alternative is capitalistic/corporate control, which has proven to not work well.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said: at least the handle is one of us.
You don't see the point because of a possible law that hasn't even been passed yet? And instead have Trump order you around?
Did you think that comparison through? :)
Amazing how this place immediately attacks Europe every time something appears that might threaten US companies in the slightest.
Its quite entertaining, every week there is a dozen articles where people derive why the DMA was needed from first principles and yet every time someone posts anything remotely approving of the EU there is endless complaints about this.
That is not why people attack the EU, at least that is not why I am personally hostile to it.
I am attcaking it because it has failed to deliver on it's promises. The whole push for digital sovereignty has been going on for years if not decades now and nothing ever materialized.
You can go back to the archives of HN to see how many articles have been shared along the years regarding the EU's attempt to start their own versions of FAANG/MANGA companies.
You can even go back to last year to see when the so called Draghi report was being talked about and see how much progress has been made to address the issues that he raised.
Then there is also the fact that the EU does not miss one occasion to publicly criticize countries that violates human rights like China and Russia all the while it's own commission is trying to exert major control on social media via the DMA and remove privacy for all citizens in Europe in order to "save the children".
Do anyone really think that EU cares about your privacy more than the US?
But when you bring any of these points, the EU supporters come back with, well that's because there is not enough EU. Listening to them, we should all just be happy to be a federation where countries become provinces that are managed by bureaucrats in Brussels.
Now, that may be what certain people want but I am not one of them.
It’s the less bad than America option.
Every time I link someone Ecosia, they always complain that it doesn't have a "clean start page", and I do agree. That, and not having the ability to see less or more of certain pages is why no one I know uses Ecosia.
I don’t use Ecosia, because their marketing messages always have been somewhat deceitful. They claimed "plant tree with your searches", but in reality, if you didn’t click on ads, nothing gets planted.
This was actually my first thought too when I got to the page.
It doesn't look like your usual search page and I had the feeling I'm not on the main page at all.
I'll still try it as my new default FF search engine since google got really bad in the past months.
related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811879
Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech
I've tested it and it's actually quite good. I'll be switching.
Totally agree. It doesn't seem limited to EU results btw. I added a bookmark on the toolbar and will be searching there first. Enough already will surveillance capitalism!
https://www.ecosia.org/
Great job, already start using it and looking good. Crawl the f..k out of internet same way all the big techs are doing, at least what´s European stays in EU. The ethics should apply to all equally. Thank you and Viva la France.
If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?
Search engines should be run as utilities. Unfortunately we are now in the stage where utilities (and other must haves such as education) are run as private enterprises.
You say that, but I don't think you actually want that. Utilities are very good for important, slowly changing type things. They ossify into conservative, safe services. Which is good if we're talking about power generation and transmission or water treatment or whatever. Search is still changing way too rapidly.
We do, on the other hand, need better regulation regarding how individual data can be used, collected, and shared, particularly in the US.
of food sector. I guess food is more important for survival than education.
Food production doesn't have the same dynamics as search does. There is little value in thousands of small search farmers each indexing their own acre of the Internet space. That's why it should be run as a utility, it's not about importance.
How soon are effects visible? Complete lack of food - days, chronic malnutrition - months or years. Lack of education - decades. Many people are not smart enough to think that far ahead.
Lack of education is also generally desirable to many people in power. Not just politicians who can more easily lie but also managers and execs. If the tax system is beyond most people's understanding, rich people are not gonna get taxed properly. If people can't do the math on how much value their work produces for a company, they are not gonna understand how big a chunk the people above them in hierarchical structures (like most companies) take out of it.
Unlike food, education (or lack of it) doesn't have universal definition. Because of that it's easy to stretch and manipulate. And it's been stretched and manipulated all the time cause possibility to indoctrinate young people creates immense political power. Like with free speech, non-uniform, not strictly state controlled (which implies private) education is a way to prevent state bureaucracy to concentrate too much power. That's not touching the fact that state hierarchies are well known for their inefficiency. Let's be fair, the reason people usually passionately bring education with politics in neighboring sentences is because it's widely accepted that our beliefs are right, and therefore people who stand against them are dumb, and maybe education can lead them (or at least their children) to our embrace! Funny thing, those "our beliefs" are often incompatible, and even opposite. Which makes me think that humanity doesn't work like that really
Current search trends, and which results get clicked for which queries, are still intrinsically valuable. Mostly for the search index signals as you mention, and other things like updating recrawl rates, etc.
Even for established players these have value because the index gets stale quickly for certain queries that many people care about a lot. Even though that value isn't fungible, or enough to break even if it were, it's the kind of value that keeps the search engine competitive.
Vivaldi has a (as private as possible, check their blog) whitelist for click attribution. My guess they refer to ads on search engines on their partner search engine.
It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
US solutions are incredibly self-centered. It's very visible to Europeans how American cultural norms completely dominate the digital public sphere. In 2025, this feels dangerous to many of us.
Examples of American cultural attitudes permeating social media platforms that have felt very odd in Europe: Firearms and violence (which is apparently allowed), and nudity (which is apparently always sexual).
The concerns about the current direction of EU regulation are valid and huge, I get that.
> US solutions are incredibly self-centered.
Even on here on somewhat technical discussions it's pretty much very visible what the US point of view is.
What's more surprising to me (also EU citizen) is how readily able we are to adopt US cultural norms to our own.
The most glaring and obvious example is the narrative surrounding race/gender relations. The EU has it's own racial issues but we get BLM riots too and we get chest thumping misandrists in Sweden.. the country that has done the most to promote gender equality of any nation on the planet.
BLM riots don't make sense in the UK for example, our race relations are much more nuanced, difficult, and probably put the Pakistani community in the most visibly disadvantaged position; but there's no space to talk about that as we're discussing George Floyd and police brutality (which, largely is not a UK issue at all).
I know for Americans this might come off as tone deaf because everything over there is so polarised it's like a battle to the death; but I think a major reason the right wing is growing in the EU is because of US cultural norms becoming prevalent (individualism over collectivism) and that naturally comes with some amount of xenophobia; as if you're living an individualistic mindset you naturally see resources as zero-sum.
The growth of right-wing movements thrive, ironically, by positioning themselves as a bulwark against what they frame as foreign cultural encroachment. It seems we're stuck trying to choose between a censored European world or an American one that doesn't fit us at all.
But if I have to choose, I choose the one that actually sort of fits.
Denmark have in the past few elections had a guy run on the promise of reinstating the Glass–Steagall Act. No word on how a Dane, in the Danish parliament would even be in a position of reintroducing a US law.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people around you adopt US mentality, problems and problem solving. This can be simple things like talking to the police, ignoring the fact that there's a huge difference in talking to a police officer in Gothenburg vs. Baltimore. Some times you even run into people protesting something that's not a problem, but US centric social media has lead them to believe it is. At the same time many are completely oblivious to local issues.
Clearly, American social platforms are the vehicles to deliver this division, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that the message is being equally engineered and promoted by other powers as well (Russia and China as a bare minimum, from the top of recently documented elections interferences).
That's not to absolve Americans at all, but rather to reinforce the idea that the EU should reign over those platforms in the EU, and/or promote its own.
I can't talk about other countries, but in France it's clear that liberals (which in my books are right wing) try to emulate the US and capture more traditional movements/struggles.
Liberal 'feminists' borrowing the US word 'empowerment' to replace the word 'emancipation', and their new feminist dream is to be a CEO instead of finding a way to smoothen or remove hierarchical structures. Beauvoir is radically reinterpreted, and d'Eaubonne forgotten.
What's funny is that most movements on the right of liberals are becoming even more US coded (all beside one in the regular right, and all beside Monarchist and Bonapartists on the far right) , enough to forget even _very recent_ memories, because they want to transform my country into the US so much. Manifesting transformism shows while transformists were not a subject for almost a century (and Michou died less than a decade ago) is peak American (which isn't an issue if you're from the US to be clear). A more anecdotal example: my mother and aunts are catholic and go to every local church event, at least since their sister died. A lot of (mostly young) people converted recently and those neo-catholic act like Puritains, like they were in a TV show. Calling Yoga devil's work and other shit like that. The priests are trying to do something because apparently it became unbearable.
I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
> I'd agree with you with the point that the local right wing ideologies are repackaged old-school nationalism reinventing itself. The most radical right wing governments are in the former communist countries where the communism was just nationalism with socialist coating. Adopting US terminology is not always adopting US ideas as well.
Our local right-wingers want to shut down our equivalent to the education department because “they are too woke”. Meanwhile those same “nationalists” want to stop funding local culture in favor of importing US culture.
This is in Finland of all places. I’m tired of our local social media drones going crazy over US nonsense but our right-wing parties want more of it.
The global cultural influence of the US is really showing and it’s going to be a wild ride as the world shifts to reject it as that influence starts turning against us.
Woke ideology was also imported whole sale from the US to your universities, so the American tint is both on action and reaction.
Woke ideology is a rebranding of social democracy and egalitarian humanism, and certainly not invented in US.
What is American is the endless need to slap a scary label on it, turn it into a culture war football, and export the outrage everywhere else. We’ve been talking about equality, workers' rights, and anti-discrimination in Europe for over a century without needing Fox News to tell us it's dangerous. Now suddenly our own politicians are parroting this imported panic as if it were homegrown wisdom.
With the Internet it takes just a few seconds of searching and reading to find that traditional Nordic / European social democracy is not the roots of modern "woke" ideology.
Especially when it comes to all the main doctrines of woke ideology concerning race and ethnicity, sexuality, immigration, labor and drug use.
Ah yes, the cancer of hamburgerization
US search engines cater to all languages and they are the only ones to do it. The opposite of self centered.
It’s great to have US offerings, but when US offerings become extreme self-centered as US offerings tend to be, I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the oligarch‘s profits and feelings” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
That was remarkably fast, even if it only covers a subset of French searches. I love Ecosia, but I half expected this to be more an PR announcement when it was first presented, not that they'd actually deliver anything, and certainly not so fast.
Did Qwants already work on an index?
Qwant has been building and using its own index, augmented by buying search results from Bing when its index falls short.
Here is the actual search page. I searched for something, looks pretty good. One small blow against enshittification:
https://www.ecosia.org/
How do you know those good-looking results were served from the new index, rather than being just rebranded Bing API results?
First, the results seem really good. Definitely better than Bing. Remember the old days when g**gle came out and it seemed amazing? A little like that.
Second, I read their blog. Critical thinking and reading helps one recognize BS.
Now the question is typically HN with no answer "proof". One can dive down a HN sub bullet tree with this. It's something like proving you exist. Nothing definitive there!
(only in France)
and even there only a small part. Goal for EOY is 50%.
more precisely:
> We’re aiming to serve 50% of French search queries by the end of the year, and will soon start rolling out to other countries.
"search index aimed to support a sovereign, privacy-first search infrastructure for Europe"
We will see which kind of data privacy they will go for this time.
- The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user
- The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to European companies.
For more context:
Qwant has taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment.
At least on the outset Ecosia seemed to resist to be drawn into traditional media and their interests quite well until now, but them working together with Qwant is not a good sign.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318151
How do you even build a search index today when websites barely link to each other?
Nowadays the bulk of linking goes to ecommerce sites (amazon) from content farms (reddit) and all those sites are submitted directly to Google. I don't think crawlable internet exists anymore.
> How do you even build a search index today
You can start with seeds like common crawl, and go from there. You can also get DNS records from various providers. Then there's SSL cert logs that you can crawl. Plenty of sources, if you have funding (search by itself without ads sponsoring it might be a net loss, except some niche uses like kagi?)
It isn't impossible nowadays to enumerate domain names using DNS data and score them based on the content they serve. Isn't that what we really want as users? Scoring based not on proxies for relevance like referral count, but on viewable content?
It's possible indeed as I'm doing it for another reason (monitoring sovereigty).
You can ask Icann [0] access to gTld domain list files (if you have a legitimate reason to do so). Once access you are granted access to a gTld, you can download a compressed csv file with a line per couple <domain, nameserver>.
[0] https://czds.icann.org/home
You are making a broad generalization and even it is based on the assumption that the page-ranking algorithm is the only possible way to do it.
I make no assumption beyond the one that if you want to index a page you need to know its address and if the author of the website is not going to give it to you because you are not Google and no known website links to it, then you have no way of finding it out. You can't build anything independently. You have to go to Google.