It has always been disturbing that to search for EU gov/public resources, we face licking the boots of Microsoft, Google, Cloudflare, etc.

Since 2024, a half-baked shitshow has been under development. It’s unclear when this shitshow will hit the fan. It starts as a join venture between #Ecosia and #Qwant. Yikes indeed. This façade ensures that the EU is very unlikely to give us a properly public resource that is independent from the US now.

Qwant and Ecosia have always been Microsoft syndicates who work in contradiction to their claimed values and purpose (privacy and environment, respectively). They have added Google syndication, because why not? Considering their patrons weren’t wise enough to condemn Microsoft.

Qwant and Ecosia both lack respect for privacy and treat the Tor community with hostility. Amazon-hosted Ecosia fails to grasp how working with Amazon and Microsoft contradicts the environmental cause.

Ecosia used to use Cloudflare (the top web enshitifier in the world, US-based). That may have changed, but they picked up Google.

The contradictions:

Microsoft (US): partners with the worst oil companies, uses AI to help them find oil digging sites. Notorious privacy abuser.

Amazon (US) and Google (US) both: partner with oil companies and uses AI to help them find oil, just like MS. Both are notorious privacy abusers.

Will the EU endorse this garbage? Likely. The general public is mostly naive about the false positioning of Qwant and Ecosia.

Looks like a bit of bullshit in Wikipedia:

“L’entreprise a pour objectif le développement d’un index de moteur de moteur de recherche souverain permettant à Qwant et Ecosia de devenir indépendant de Microsoft Bing et Google[1],[2].”