I just saw the news that Ecosia has (bizarrely) decided to drop its French AI partner, Mistral, in favor of a Chinese model with questionable morals. Reminded me that, two years ago, Ecosia and...
I just saw the news that Ecosia has (bizarrely) decided to drop its French AI partner, Mistral, in favor of a Chinese model with questionable morals.
Reminded me that, two years ago, Ecosia and Qwant made a big announcement that they were starting a joint venture together, to build a fully in-house, EU-based search index to challenge the Google/Bing duopoly.
... and then I never heard anything more about it.
Turns out, I missed not one, but two big follow-ups, and I figured if I missed them, maybe you did, too.
I'm still figuring out what this means ... there's no new dedicated front-end search service connected to it (yet?), and even the algorithm/engine that uses the index is still being developed. Both Qwant and Ecosia search engines are (apparently) in the on-going process, behind the scenes, of gradually shifting their search results to come less and less from Google, and more and more from their homegrown index.
But, anyway, there it is, an Index of one's own for the Internet.
There actually is: https://www.xprivo.com/search/ EUSP has been packaged as a product by Staan, and Xprivo uses this for their search. I think PR has been severely lacking around the index.
there's no new dedicated front-end search service connected to it (yet?)
xprivo seems serviceable as far as search results are concerned. I'm extremely leery about their AI chat though. It gives you a splash page about how it's built with privacy and security in mind,...
xprivo seems serviceable as far as search results are concerned.
I'm extremely leery about their AI chat though. It gives you a splash page about how it's built with privacy and security in mind, and then after about 3 prompts I was already served an ad for a VPN.
Heard about EUSP a while back and was hoping it would provide another solid search index for the web. I'm not entirely sure about it yet. One place I've seen EUSP used as one of the available...
Heard about EUSP a while back and was hoping it would provide another solid search index for the web. I'm not entirely sure about it yet.
One place I've seen EUSP used as one of the available providers is Uruky. However I discontinued that service after a while because my results got really bad and just not useful at all, even after doing a lot of reconfiguring of the "order" of the provider backends that Uruky connects to, including things like having EUSP at the top and so on, which for a time yielded decent results.
Waterfox Private Search allows you to choose Serper (Google API) or Staan (EUSP), but I have not yet tried it out. It does have a few-day trial at least.
Both of these engines avoid AI search features altogether, which I love (and require)- I think all the ones that do have them have questionable morals so China isn't of specific concern to me re:Ecosia. I currently use noAI version of DuckDuckGo, though I might give Waterfox Private a go
I just saw the news that Ecosia has (bizarrely) decided to drop its French AI partner, Mistral, in favor of a Chinese model with questionable morals.
Reminded me that, two years ago, Ecosia and Qwant made a big announcement that they were starting a joint venture together, to build a fully in-house, EU-based search index to challenge the Google/Bing duopoly.
... and then I never heard anything more about it.
Turns out, I missed not one, but two big follow-ups, and I figured if I missed them, maybe you did, too.
Last year, the new search index went live in France, and just a couple of months ago, it went live in Germany, too.
I'm still figuring out what this means ... there's no new dedicated front-end search service connected to it (yet?), and even the algorithm/engine that uses the index is still being developed. Both Qwant and Ecosia search engines are (apparently) in the on-going process, behind the scenes, of gradually shifting their search results to come less and less from Google, and more and more from their homegrown index.
But, anyway, there it is, an Index of one's own for the Internet.
There actually is: https://www.xprivo.com/search/
EUSP has been packaged as a product by Staan, and Xprivo uses this for their search.
I think PR has been severely lacking around the index.
xprivo seems serviceable as far as search results are concerned.
I'm extremely leery about their AI chat though. It gives you a splash page about how it's built with privacy and security in mind, and then after about 3 prompts I was already served an ad for a VPN.
Heard about EUSP a while back and was hoping it would provide another solid search index for the web. I'm not entirely sure about it yet.
One place I've seen EUSP used as one of the available providers is Uruky. However I discontinued that service after a while because my results got really bad and just not useful at all, even after doing a lot of reconfiguring of the "order" of the provider backends that Uruky connects to, including things like having EUSP at the top and so on, which for a time yielded decent results.
Waterfox Private Search allows you to choose Serper (Google API) or Staan (EUSP), but I have not yet tried it out. It does have a few-day trial at least.
Both of these engines avoid AI search features altogether, which I love (and require)- I think all the ones that do have them have questionable morals so China isn't of specific concern to me re:Ecosia. I currently use noAI version of DuckDuckGo, though I might give Waterfox Private a go