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Wow, quite a bombshell! Ecosia & Qwant join forces to build own search index. Their reasons: Rollout starts in France next quarter already 🤯 38 comments
@Techaltar I mean I'd take it. 😁 Also pretty nice to see a search index built inside EU, I'd imagine that could be an asset in itself.  @Techaltar given the for profit model of the venture and the desire to do more of their own generative AI, it sounds more like they want to *become* Big Tech themselves. @noodlejetski do you think there is a future where Gen Ai doesn't become a central part of search in the next 10 years? @Techaltar with how much resources it burns in the process, I sure would hope so. @noodlejetski @Techaltar yeah, that's weird... Ecosia claims to plant trees, while AI essentially burns them... @Techaltar @noodlejetski I do want stuff to be found rather than generated, when I search things  @Techaltar @noodlejetski gen AI is expensive so I don't expect companies to be able to keep it up even if they wanted to  @Techaltar @noodlejetski Yes. Just like there is (luckily) a future for search without blockchain.  @Techaltar normal search used to be so damn powerful - do they really think the LLM stuff can cut through the SEO bullshit ...? so far it only feels like it's making results even worse edit: I also don't get how ecosia of all things thinks LLMs are efficient for them ... @delolzer DDG is in the same situation, as they also use Bing's search index :/ @Techaltar great news. I think the last part is key, and I hope they can make some sort of deal with Mistral or something @Techaltar Hopefully they can also make a better search engine than Bing. I use ecosia by default but often times I go back to Google, because as bad as it's gotten, it's still better than Bing. @danbrotherston Ecosia now uses Google under the hood if you let them. I've found it really quite good since! @Techaltar Interesting! I'll have to look into that. Although it does rather neuter the other goal of using ecosia which is de-googlification. Admittedly this also fails when I go back to Google, but at least then I know I'm doing so rather than it being a hidden thing.  @Techaltar wow, this is big news. and while exciting, it also raises many questions. how much will they rely on llm's to provide results? how much of the results will still be provided by bing? are they willing to pay the sums that a lot of big content aggregators, most notably reddit, will want from them to crawl their sites or will that specific part (which due to size is the most useful) still be delivered through bing? @dxciBel @Techaltar The LLM results thing is a big Q for me as well. Maybe it’s just old man yelling at cloud syndrome, but I’m not confident I’ll ever trust an LLM to produce a search result. Summaries? That’s one thing, though my preference is to avoid those in search queries as well. Could be useful. But producing results? I don’t know man. @LandoDev @Techaltar not to mention the sheer amount of power the data centers that power these llm's use is actively hindering a shift to sustainable energy. i hate that they're everywhere now. @Techaltar I might actually switch to Ecosia, now. Twill be a cold day in hell before I do anything to economically benefit Bing.  @Techaltar : anyone familiar with Qwant history will tell you to not have any hope if Qwant is involved in something. And, as far is I know, Ecosia has never been more than green-washing advertisement so, yeah, I’m not thrilled.  Depending on what you read, AI-augmented search uses 8 times as much energy and water as regular search. So Ecosia, if it was ever truly environmentally beneficial, almost certainly became a net negative for the environment once it incorporated AI. I was excited by this announcement because I immediately assumed Ecosia and Qwant were ditching AI. I was wrong.  @Techaltar That's excellent news! There are so many search engines that use other engines. It'll be nice to have additional engines that have their own crawlers. I'm usually lucky enough to find what I'm looking for with DuckDuckGo, but I've hoped over and used both Ecosia and Qwant at times. I look forward to seeing what they do. @Techaltar im just gonna drop this here https://openwebsearch.eu/owler/ There is allready a Open Web Index in the making @Techaltar neither of them have their own crawlers, so neither of them provide original search results. What google/bing enforces will be indirectly enforced on them aswell  @lake_norm@mastodon.social @Techaltar@mas.to The article is about their plan to make their own crawler and index.  @Techaltar We desperately need Non-US search engines and other products, the US in not anybody's friend any more. @Techaltar Initially loved the idea: real competition in the search sphere would be great, and it’s cool that the two companies are partnering to make that happen. Also like the supposed privacy centric approach to results. But the significant focus on GenAI kills a lot of the vibe for me. I don’t believe GenAI will have a meaningful part to play in effective search engines, and even if they did I don’t think it’s worth the resource consumption. Fees like Google tech bros all over again |
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@Techaltar OK, this is interesting.
I have hopes up that maybe we'll get a search engine almost as good as Google was in 2010.