Ask search engine Ecosia about “Paris to Prague” and flight booking websites dominate the results. Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to introduce more train options, which he considers better for the environment. But because its results are licensed by Google and Bing by Microsoft, Ecosia has little control over what is displayed. Kroll is ready for that to change.
Berlin-based Ecosia, which donates its profits to tree planting, and its Paris-based competitor Qwant, announced Tuesday that they are teaming up to develop a web index.
The for-profit joint venture, called European Search Perspective and located in Paris, could allow small businesses and any others that decide to join to reduce their dependence on Google and Bing and deliver results that better fit their missions and goals. companies. The tastes of Europeans. “We could declassify the results of unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” Kroll says of the green-minded Ecosia.
Losing a bit of licensing revenue won’t be a big blow to Microsoft or Google, which together own about 95 percent of the global search industry outside of China. But at a time when services like ChatGPT and TikTok are already redefining the way users search, smaller rivals that potentially become more attractive to users could force larger companies to accelerate their investments in regional updates.
Ownership of European Search Perspective, or EUSP, will be split equally between Ecosia and Qwant, with Ecosia providing cash and data, while Qwant will provide the labor. The technical infrastructure will come from OVHcloud, which is co-owned with Qwant. Ecosia has about 1 percent search market share in France and Germany and claims to have around 20 million users worldwide, while Qwant reports around 6 million users.
For Ecosia and Qwant, conquering more of the world beyond French- and German-speaking users will require success at home and increasing revenue, which largely comes from serving ads. The challenge is evident. Ecosia sales, according to his revelationsare down 8 percent to 24.2 million euros during the first nine months of this year compared to the same period in 2023. More accurate results are not guaranteed to help boost the business: the ads are still provided by Microsoft and Google. Kroll says that’s going to change soon.
The companies are open to both raising external funding for EUSP and licensing their index to other companies, including those that want to use the data to train AI systems. “We are bringing together the most experienced search engineers to create sovereign technology in Europe, especially for the French and German languages, and we are extremely confident that this will attract the investment community,” says Kroll.
