The move aims to boost European technological sovereignty.
To reduce European dependence on American technology firms, the European Parliament has replaced Google with a French search engine, Qwant.
Qwant generates its search results by querying the Microsoft Bing API.
Many users called the European Parliament's switch to Qwant ridiculous and a waste of time because it replaces one US company with another and yields poor results, while some praised it as a pragmatic step toward European sovereignty.
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@pietergaricano I don't know why that isn't mentioned more prominently in the article, but Qwant and Ecosia have over the last two years started building a proper alternative.
https://www.eu-searchperspective.com
From what I can gather, 50% of the results already rely on the new index.
@filipe_mdsr Not a great sign that they've spent two years trying to replicate technology that has been around for twenty years, and still go down whenever Bing has an outage.
@InigoLauci I see a world of business opportunities creating EU-headquartered wrappers of American companies.
@pietergaricano Considering that started afterwards, I don't see the relation. The index went live in 2025.
And building your own index, which can serve any request is really hard. So hard, only very few companies like Google and Bing are able to do it. And now also Qwant/Ecosia.
@pietergaricano Brave is doing a smaller index, so they have worse results on long-tail results. While the EUSP wants to cover everything.
And yes, Russia and China have their own indexes. But they do also perform worse than Google and Bing outside their main userbase.
In 2019, they used Bing for 64 percent of results, now you say they're using it for 50 percent. Doesn't seem like a tremendous improvement. Also, haven't Brave and Mojeek (as well as Yandex and Baidu) done it?
Why is it a priority for Europe to build its own search index anyways?
@dontjinpingme Only self-serve
@pietergaricano They don't have worse results, as they fallback on Bing. That is what I mean with pragmatic.
Ecosia and Qwant are great replacements. And over time, they will still be great, but also 100% European.
@pietergaricano that's misinformation, they are replacing it with Staan co-created by Qwant and Ecosia which is different from the original qwant search engine. It is not dependent on Bing API
@unawake71228822 Hasn't happened yet though. They're still routing traffic through Bing.
@pietergaricano Qwant and Ecosia are still the only ones the closest to a completely European sovereign solution and working towards 100%.
Which is a good thing. And they are pragmatic about it, also a good thing. That the Parliament bets on them, also a good thing.
@filipe_mdsr I don't want the European parliament to uses its procurement operation to "bet on" anything!
Even if a European search browser were important, which it isn't, I don't think we should support it by giving a group of parliamentarians worse search results.
@pietergaricano Bing api retired last year FWIW
@pietergaricano Now that's a proper A(P)I wrapper!
@pietergaricano Total waste of time and energy
@WolfeFolks Self-serve isn't, but enterprise is.
@PedroPetizViana How did this get pushed through?
@filipe_mdsr @pietergaricano But Bing also sucks compared to Google.
@pietergaricano @filipe_mdsr Qwant went almost bankrupt and got bought by Synfonium in 2023
@pietergaricano Is bing api still a thing?
