Companies are open to both raising external funding for the EUSP and licensing its index to other companies, including those that might want to use the data to train AI systems. “We are bringing together the most experienced search engineers to build sovereign technology in Europe – especially for French and German, and we are extremely confident that this will appeal to the investment community,” says Kroll.
Developing an index—identifying all websites on the Internet and making their contents searchable—is not a trivial task. Doing it better than Google, which has perfected its approach for decades, is even more frightening.
But Kroll believes that technical advances have made accessible indexing more possible, and new EU regulations limiting the power of watchdogs like Google make 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 respects, the development of an alternative index is now imperative. Last year, Bing increased the licensing fees it charges companies like Eocisa and Qwant, forcing them to recalibrate their offerings.
Ecosia and Qwant expect to begin testing updated 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 deliver results. Kroll says EUSP aims to reach competitive speeds through testing and tuning. “The user experience will not be compromised,” he says.
In the best case scenario for Qwant and Ecosia, they could provide Europe with what Naver offers in South Korea. Heesoo Jang, an assistant professor of media law and ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says irrelevant and spammy Google results have turned South Korean users away from the service. By some estimates, Naver now accounts for more than half of South Korea’s search market.
There is also an opportunity for European search engines to break into underserved countries like Ethiopia. In June, a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that searches in Ethiopian languages such as Amharic on Google’s YouTube for popular but benign topics led to results for sexual content. Researchers say users describe their search experience as overwhelming and “terrible.” Google generally believes that it is always working to improve the quality of results and deliver the content users want faster.
Helina Hailu Nigatu, one of the authors of the study, says that a search engine tailored to a specific language is not enough. “It’s not just the language that matters, but the social identity that shapes them,” she says. Developers must consider society’s values, which stem from ethnicity, class, and other factors. With its focus on the environment, Ecosia may already have an edge there.
