European search providers collaborate to rival US tech

‘It is all about the sovereignty of our business and companies’

Two search providers have teamed up to create a European search infrastructure that rivals Google’s dominance.

Qwant, based in France, and Ecosia, in Germany, plan to use the European Search Perspective (EUSP) to reduce the region’s reliance on American technology.

Ownership will be split equally between the partners, and the infrastructure is intended to offer improved French and German language search results. The launch is planned for early next year, initially in France.

Most searches today take place on Google’s infrastructure, even if they’re not performed on Google’s own website. Even rivals like Ecosia and Qwant rely on US technology to deliver their results.

Is that a problem?

In a nutshell, yes. European tech providers are startlingly absent from the world stage – SAP, and perhaps OVHCloud, are some of the only ones with a true global presence, scale and brand recognition.

As we wrote in 2023, in research on the hybrid cloud market, “Given the high cloud costs, worries about lock-in, increasing regulation around data sovereignty, where are the UK and European clouds?”

More recently, Donald Trump’s re-election as US President has made IT leaders concerned about their reliance on American tech.

Mark Ridley, consulting CTO and technical co-founder of Reed.co.uk, told us last week, “If the borders are drawn more tightly...and relationships with both the UK and EU grow more frosty, as Trump himself has indicated, we are startlingly exposed.”

The partners will build the infrastructure for their new venture from scratch, using results from a mix of search engines and technology from Qwant. This is helped by the Digital Markets Act, which requires gatekeeper firms like Google to share certain data – in Google’s case, data that would be useful for training a search model.

Like Qwant’s existing search, the new index will be “privacy-first.”

Both Ecosia and Qwant will use the new search index and will make it available to other independent search engines and tech firms.

“We are European companies and we need to build technology that makes sure no third-party decision - for instance, Microsoft’s decision to increase costs to access their search API - could jeopardise our business,” Olivier Abecassis, CEO of Qwant, told CNBC.

“It is nothing against the US or US companies. It is all about the sovereignty of our business and companies.”

In an interview ahead of the launch, Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll said Trump’s election could escalate geopolitical tensions, and indicated that Europe needed to be more self-reliant.