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.
Within their AI chat they have a button (PLUS+) that takes you to camocopy.com, which is also an AI chat service by their (parent?) company. Also 100 PRO-model requests for 8 eur / month is just...
Within their AI chat they have a button (PLUS+) that takes you to camocopy.com, which is also an AI chat service by their (parent?) company. Also 100 PRO-model requests for 8 eur / month is just not a great deal. (I know search is included but still)
I was reading somewhere (maybe here on Tildes?) that Mistral is apparently really painful to rely on - the models are fine, but the API breaks in all sorts of different ways that mean it's hard to...
I was reading somewhere (maybe here on Tildes?) that Mistral is apparently really painful to rely on - the models are fine, but the API breaks in all sorts of different ways that mean it's hard to consistently use. So while it's ideal from a theoretical privacy/sovereignty perspective, I can understand Ecosia deciding that, for now, they need to find a different provider.
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 haven't heard of Waterfox Private Search. Their website doesn't even mention what indexes they use. But if they do use EUSP and Serper like you say then the results will be identical to what you...
I haven't heard of Waterfox Private Search. Their website doesn't even mention what indexes they use. But if they do use EUSP and Serper like you say then the results will be identical to what you would get with Uruky.
Uruky only pulls results from whatever the #1 index is in your order, unless they don't get enough results from it, in that case they will go for #2, #3 and so on. So if you put EUSP at #1 spot you will be getting it for 98% of the queries.
Uruky also has a lot of other smaller, independent search indexes.
Personally, EUSP as #1 and then falling back to Serper and a few other external search engines ( DDG + Brave) does the job for me. Probably the best thing I like about it is the fact that I can configure other external search engines as fallback and can access them with a mouse click. I can also switch indexes with a mouse click.
I did this writeup about Uruky awhile back about all the things I like about it. Perhaps someone will find it interesting.
For some reason Waterfox Search buries the info about their indexes in their terms/privacy policy (and to trial/paying accounts which have the preference exposed). I know for a fact it has not...
For some reason Waterfox Search buries the info about their indexes in their terms/privacy policy (and to trial/paying accounts which have the preference exposed). I know for a fact it has not been long since they were Serper/Google only and EUSP is a recent addition. No idea why they don't advertise it. The service is also annoyingly slow for a minimal search engine. Results really lag a lot before displaying and this is the only engine with which I've had such an experience. I will not be paying once my trial has ended.
Regardless, I now have experience to back up there somehow being a difference. EUSP was my #1 index on Uruky for a long time up until I discontinued the service. When I first started the service some other smaller index was priority #1 and that made my search results 100% irrelevant to my query. Once I swapped to EUSP the results seemed to be mostly reasonable, however, that fell off over time with no preference / reordering change on my end. Simply, over time, with EUSP set as #1 in the order, my results slowly degraded to the point where free alternatives simply and inarguably provided better and more relevant results and I did not have any luck with testing other indexes through Uruky either. Sometimes half of my results on the page would have absolutely nothing to do with my query. No idea why. It was maddening.
I now am using the free trial of Waterfox Private Search and choosing Staan/EUSP as the index (Serper/Google is the other choice) and so far the results are better than they were under Uruky with EUSP set as my #1. I cannot truly explain why outside of a potential bug within Uruky or other provider issue leading to EUSP not functioning or being the first in order despite that being my explicit choice in preferences, or some other difference in how these search engines are using EUSP.
Regardless, the point is mostly moot because I don't find Waterfox search nor Uruky good enough to pay for, and the one paid engine I think is good enough to pay for (Kagi) I refuse to support, so it will be NoAI DuckDuckGo for me for the foreseeable future and it's good enough to be serviceable. If I need a different result set I'll temporarily use another place like Startpage, but that should be a rarity. I've decided at this point if I'm going to ever pay for a search engine again, the results and experience have to be significantly better than the experiences I can get for free and outside of Kagi such an engine does not exist
Strange that our experiences with EUSP differ so much. I've been using it and I found it surprisingly good, close to Bing's level. Even searches in my native language (Lithuanian) have very decent...
Strange that our experiences with EUSP differ so much. I've been using it and I found it surprisingly good, close to Bing's level. Even searches in my native language (Lithuanian) have very decent results. I'd say the only thing it kinda struggles with and where I use Serper is when I need to do specific site: searches (Bing is also not good with this, probably even worse).
But yeah, it's a fact that you can use some private wrappers around Bing / Google and get just as good results for free. For now, I don't think Uruky adds THAT MUCH to the search experience where I can say I'm getting insane value for 5 eur / month, but at the same time I can't say that it's a bad deal. It's OK.
Considering they started only a few months ago I think they're doing really well. I remember maybe 3 years ago I tried Kagi and I felt the same way. It was ok , but no way I would pay 10$ / month for what it was offering at that time. A year later they improved so much that I could easily see myself subscribing.
I mainly pay for Uruky because I feel like european, big-tech independent search indexes are a good idea to support. The problem is they're kinda ... not so good (except EUSP). With Uruky I can use them but at the same time when needed go for Serper quickly. Even if you subscribe to Kagi, you can't choose the indexes you use. For all you know they may be routing 80% of your searches through Bing / Google / Yandex. Not the companies I want to support.
Kagi is the best search engine there is but I also refuse to support them because of the whole Yandex fiasco. Seeing what Russians are doing to the world and just thinking of supporting a company that has financial ties to them is just not for me. They're also more expensive. But after Kagi I do really think Uruky is #2. But there's not much competition. I don't know why but there's lots of search engines that just don't do much outside of the bare basics, and a lot of them are google / bing wrappers or independent indexes that are sadly too weak to use on their own.
I'll add another separate voice to the "I'd pay for kagi but I find them distasteful" pile. Mostly for the same reasons others express here; I don't want to pay for anyone's AI product (as in, I...
I'll add another separate voice to the "I'd pay for kagi but I find them distasteful" pile.
Mostly for the same reasons others express here; I don't want to pay for anyone's AI product (as in, I am quite anti AI, not that I want it for free) and hands off attempts to be apolitical are bullshit. Everything is political, deal with it, make better choices and make a better world.
Yandex is one small facet, yes. Mainly I refuse to have my subscription money subsidize their AI products in general and not to mention things like their decision to include Grok as a provider...
Yandex is one small facet, yes. Mainly I refuse to have my subscription money subsidize their AI products in general and not to mention things like their decision to include Grok as a provider option in their assistant, but providing AI products at all that my subscription subsidizes is a dealbreaker for me.
Kagi's partnership with Brave is also something I oppose (I refuse to use Brave for a number of ethical reasons, including Eich's views and Brave's cryptocurrency nonsense). I do not care if Kagi/Vlad take what they think is a "principled apolitical" stance regarding who they do business with- they are free to think that's what they're doing and I'm free to walk away. He is so high on his enlightened apoliticism or "hands-off approach" that he refuses to have a helpline/etc appear at the top of search results for suicide-related terms and phrases, for example
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.
Within their AI chat they have a button (PLUS+) that takes you to camocopy.com, which is also an AI chat service by their (parent?) company. Also 100 PRO-model requests for 8 eur / month is just not a great deal. (I know search is included but still)
I was reading somewhere (maybe here on Tildes?) that Mistral is apparently really painful to rely on - the models are fine, but the API breaks in all sorts of different ways that mean it's hard to consistently use. So while it's ideal from a theoretical privacy/sovereignty perspective, I can understand Ecosia deciding that, for now, they need to find a different provider.
Works fine for me (but for normal UI chat/vibe use, I don't use the APIs directly).
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 haven't heard of Waterfox Private Search. Their website doesn't even mention what indexes they use. But if they do use EUSP and Serper like you say then the results will be identical to what you would get with Uruky.
Uruky only pulls results from whatever the #1 index is in your order, unless they don't get enough results from it, in that case they will go for #2, #3 and so on. So if you put EUSP at #1 spot you will be getting it for 98% of the queries.
Uruky also has a lot of other smaller, independent search indexes.
Personally, EUSP as #1 and then falling back to Serper and a few other external search engines ( DDG + Brave) does the job for me. Probably the best thing I like about it is the fact that I can configure other external search engines as fallback and can access them with a mouse click. I can also switch indexes with a mouse click.
I did this writeup about Uruky awhile back about all the things I like about it. Perhaps someone will find it interesting.
For some reason Waterfox Search buries the info about their indexes in their terms/privacy policy (and to trial/paying accounts which have the preference exposed). I know for a fact it has not been long since they were Serper/Google only and EUSP is a recent addition. No idea why they don't advertise it. The service is also annoyingly slow for a minimal search engine. Results really lag a lot before displaying and this is the only engine with which I've had such an experience. I will not be paying once my trial has ended.
Regardless, I now have experience to back up there somehow being a difference. EUSP was my #1 index on Uruky for a long time up until I discontinued the service. When I first started the service some other smaller index was priority #1 and that made my search results 100% irrelevant to my query. Once I swapped to EUSP the results seemed to be mostly reasonable, however, that fell off over time with no preference / reordering change on my end. Simply, over time, with EUSP set as #1 in the order, my results slowly degraded to the point where free alternatives simply and inarguably provided better and more relevant results and I did not have any luck with testing other indexes through Uruky either. Sometimes half of my results on the page would have absolutely nothing to do with my query. No idea why. It was maddening.
I now am using the free trial of Waterfox Private Search and choosing Staan/EUSP as the index (Serper/Google is the other choice) and so far the results are better than they were under Uruky with EUSP set as my #1. I cannot truly explain why outside of a potential bug within Uruky or other provider issue leading to EUSP not functioning or being the first in order despite that being my explicit choice in preferences, or some other difference in how these search engines are using EUSP.
Regardless, the point is mostly moot because I don't find Waterfox search nor Uruky good enough to pay for, and the one paid engine I think is good enough to pay for (Kagi) I refuse to support, so it will be NoAI DuckDuckGo for me for the foreseeable future and it's good enough to be serviceable. If I need a different result set I'll temporarily use another place like Startpage, but that should be a rarity. I've decided at this point if I'm going to ever pay for a search engine again, the results and experience have to be significantly better than the experiences I can get for free and outside of Kagi such an engine does not exist
Strange that our experiences with EUSP differ so much. I've been using it and I found it surprisingly good, close to Bing's level. Even searches in my native language (Lithuanian) have very decent results. I'd say the only thing it kinda struggles with and where I use Serper is when I need to do specific site: searches (Bing is also not good with this, probably even worse).
But yeah, it's a fact that you can use some private wrappers around Bing / Google and get just as good results for free. For now, I don't think Uruky adds THAT MUCH to the search experience where I can say I'm getting insane value for 5 eur / month, but at the same time I can't say that it's a bad deal. It's OK.
Considering they started only a few months ago I think they're doing really well. I remember maybe 3 years ago I tried Kagi and I felt the same way. It was ok , but no way I would pay 10$ / month for what it was offering at that time. A year later they improved so much that I could easily see myself subscribing.
I mainly pay for Uruky because I feel like european, big-tech independent search indexes are a good idea to support. The problem is they're kinda ... not so good (except EUSP). With Uruky I can use them but at the same time when needed go for Serper quickly. Even if you subscribe to Kagi, you can't choose the indexes you use. For all you know they may be routing 80% of your searches through Bing / Google / Yandex. Not the companies I want to support.
Kagi is the best search engine there is but I also refuse to support them because of the whole Yandex fiasco. Seeing what Russians are doing to the world and just thinking of supporting a company that has financial ties to them is just not for me. They're also more expensive. But after Kagi I do really think Uruky is #2. But there's not much competition. I don't know why but there's lots of search engines that just don't do much outside of the bare basics, and a lot of them are google / bing wrappers or independent indexes that are sadly too weak to use on their own.
Yandex issue, or something else?
I'll add another separate voice to the "I'd pay for kagi but I find them distasteful" pile.
Mostly for the same reasons others express here; I don't want to pay for anyone's AI product (as in, I am quite anti AI, not that I want it for free) and hands off attempts to be apolitical are bullshit. Everything is political, deal with it, make better choices and make a better world.
Yandex is one small facet, yes. Mainly I refuse to have my subscription money subsidize their AI products in general and not to mention things like their decision to include Grok as a provider option in their assistant, but providing AI products at all that my subscription subsidizes is a dealbreaker for me.
Kagi's partnership with Brave is also something I oppose (I refuse to use Brave for a number of ethical reasons, including Eich's views and Brave's cryptocurrency nonsense). I do not care if Kagi/Vlad take what they think is a "principled apolitical" stance regarding who they do business with- they are free to think that's what they're doing and I'm free to walk away. He is so high on his enlightened apoliticism or "hands-off approach" that he refuses to have a helpline/etc appear at the top of search results for suicide-related terms and phrases, for example
Ah yes, I keep forgetting about Brave. I won't use their browser and keep forgetting they're involved in search.