Ask the search engine Ecosia for “Paris to Prague” and flight booking websites dominate the results. Ecosia's CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to present more train options, which he believes is better for the environment. But because the results are licensed by Google and Microsoft's Bing, Ecosia has little control over what is shown. Kroll is ready for that to change.
Berlin-based Ecosia, which donates its profits to planting trees, and its Paris-based competitor Qwant announced Tuesday that they will work together to develop an index of the Internet.
The profitable joint venture, called European Search Perspective and based in Paris, could enable small businesses and anyone else who decides to join to reduce their dependence on Google and Bing and deliver results better tailored to the missions of their company and The taste of Europeans. “We could lower the results of unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” says Kroll of the environmentally conscious Ecosia.
Losing a little licensing revenue won't be a major 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, small rivals potentially becoming more attractive to users could force the bigger companies to accelerate their investments in regional upgrades.
Ownership of European Search Perspective, or EUSP, will be split equally between Ecosia and Qwant, with Ecosia providing cash and data while Qwant provides the labor. The technical infrastructure will come from OVHcloud, which shares ownership with Qwant. Ecosia has a search market share of about 1 percent in France and Germany and claims about 20 million users worldwide, while Qwant reports about 6 million users.
For Ecosia and Qwant, conquering more of the world than just French and German-speaking users will require success at home and growing revenues, much of which comes from serving ads. The challenge is clear. According to the announcements, Ecosia's turnover fell by 8 percent to €24.2 million in the first nine months of this year compared to the same period in 2023. More precise results are not guaranteed to boost the company – the advertisements are still running offered. by Microsoft and Google. Kroll says this will change soon.
The companies are open to both raising external funding for EUSP and licensing the index to other companies, including those that may want to use the data to train AI systems. “We are bringing together the most experienced search engineers to build sovereign technology in Europe, especially for the French and German languages, and we are confident that this will appeal to the investment community,” says Kroll.
