Political crisis, economic crisis, Donald Trump's victory which could increase American imperialism in terms of technology… It is in this gloomy context for the two leading European powers that the French Qwant and the German Ecosia are joining forces to attempt to develop their own Internet search technology, they announced on Tuesday, November 12.
The main challenge of this union is to succeed in building a European search index, in other words the technology which makes it possible to reference the entire Web. An essential building block for true European sovereignty in terms of online research.
Because today, only the Americans Google, Microsoft – with Bing for the latter – and Yahoo have their own index in the West. Although positioned as alternatives to these giants, Qwant, Ecosia and all the others (DuckDuckGo, Lilo…) are forced to partner with one of them – especially Google and Bing – to provide results. relevant searches for Internet users.
In reality, they only stand out at the margins: either by promising to respect online privacy by not tracking Internet users in their activities (Qwant, DuckDuckGo), or with an ethical positioning: Ecosia devotes 100% of its profits to to reforestation and environmental protection projects, while Lilo supports social and environmental projects. And everyone only gets the crumbs from the market, dominated by more than 90% in Europe by Google.
Qwant sold for a pittance to Synfonium (Octave Klaba)
Towards a hybridization of AI and Internet search
Aware since its creation in 2011 of the crucial issue of sovereignty, Qwant was the only alternative search engine to embark on the creation of its own Web index. In 2023, at the time of its acquisition by the Synfonium group of brothers Octave and Miroslaw Klaba (also founders of OVHCloud), it responded to 60% of requests and had to use Bing for the remaining 40%.
« Like Ecosia, we were built with Microsoft's Bing solution », Explains to La Tribune, Olivier Abecassis, general manager of Qwant. “ But it has evolved in a worrying way over the past year, with price increases and new conditions of use. “, he laments.
Among these, the former distribution, innovation and digital director of the TF1 group cites the uses linked to generative AI. “ We are moving towards a hybridization of generative AI models with internet search. These two industries will therefore come closer together in the years to come », Notes Olivier Abecassis, saying he wants to avoid a strengthening of the already dominant positions of certain players in these two sectors.
At this stage, Qwant is testing all LLM models on the market, even if its general director assures that he wants “ favor European technologies “. He nevertheless recognizes that the final model may not be “ mono-LLM », because some models work better than others depending on user requests in particular.
Search engines: “There is no real choice for the consumer compared to Google” (Sophie Bodin, Lilo)
A 50-50 agreement
But before getting there, European Search Perspective, the joint venture that brings together Qwant and Ecosia, will work to build the “ first fundamental brick »: the search index. This will only serve results in French and German, and may be made available to other independent search engines and technology companies, via an API.
If the two companies come together for this common project, each will keep its specificity: data confidentiality for Qwant, ecology for Ecosia, the engine “ who plants trees ».
To create this index, the two allies are not starting from scratch. They take as a basis the already substantial work carried out by the French search engine. So, “ Qwant's engineers and data scientists and the related intellectual property of the index will be transferred within the joint venture » to finish the job. With the objective, which Qwant has never been able to achieve, that the future index will be capable of responding to 100% of queries.
The joint venture thus created is 50% owned by the two parties, without further details on the investments necessary to build this index. “ We do not communicate on the figures, but I can say that the agreement is quite substantial », specifies Olivier Abecassis.
Qwant and Ecosia announce that they will start using this search technology by the end of the first quarter of 2025. The deployment will be extended to Germany by the end of next year.
Sovereign digital: Octave Klaba and Caisse des Dépôts create Synfonium, a European champion which immediately wants to take on Qwant
