Our European search index goes live

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scope and rollout of the new index

  • Launch is currently France-only and covers only a fraction of French queries; target is 50% of French search traffic by year’s end, with later expansion to other countries.
  • Some commenters are impressed by how fast Ecosia/Qwant delivered something after earlier announcements; others question how much traffic is actually hitting the new index vs Bing results.
  • Qwant already maintains its own index and augments it with Bing where needed; this collaboration is seen as a logical extension.

Can you even build a new index today?

  • One view: the “crawlable web” is dying because sites barely link, SEO dominates, and many URLs are essentially fed directly to Google; therefore, independent discovery is impossible.
  • Counterpoints:
    • Link-based PageRank is not the only ranking method.
    • Domain enumeration via DNS zone files (ICANN CZDS), SSL certificate logs, Common Crawl seeds, and commercial DNS data can bootstrap a large index.
    • Ranking could emphasize page content rather than link referrals.

Privacy, ads, and utility vs business

  • Question raised whether ad-blocking users (e.g., uBlock) are “worth it” to search engines; answer: even without ad clicks, query and click patterns remain valuable for ranking and recrawl decisions.
  • Some argue search should be treated like a regulated utility; others say utilities tend to ossify, and search still changes too fast for that model.
  • Skepticism about “privacy-first European infrastructure”: concern it may just reallocate power and data from Google to EU media/telecom players, with Qwant’s investors cited as a warning sign.

UX, quality, and adoption

  • Several testers report surprisingly good results and are considering switching from Google; others find Ecosia’s results ad-heavy and weaker than DuckDuckGo.
  • The busy, non-minimalist start page is a recurring complaint.
  • Some distrust Ecosia’s older “plant trees with your searches” messaging, feeling that ad-click dependence was under-emphasized.

European vs US control and culture

  • Strong support for non-US search options as a way to reduce dependence on US tech and norms; equally strong fear that EU regulation (e.g., chat control, “protect the children”) could lead to censorship.
  • Long tangent on imported US culture wars (“woke,” identity politics, BLM) shaping European discourse, with disagreement over whether this is corrosive or a continuation of European egalitarian ideas.
  • Debate over whether EU structures are sufficiently democratic and whether “digital sovereignty” actually improves user freedom, versus simply swapping one set of political constraints for another.

Regulation, cookies, and GDPR

  • Some hope European infrastructure might eventually lead to a saner web (e.g., fewer cookie banners), with the observation that banners are largely an anti-pattern created by tracking-heavy business models.