They were historically completely dependent on Bing (like most other search engines) and while they continued putting some efforts in building their own index, they're nowhere close to it.

They also recently made a few moves to push advertising and to compromise with privacy (eg. the option to create tracked account to access some AI services).

On the other hands they will probably be more respectful than Google, and the quality of Google's results seems to be degrading faster than Qwant is improving 🤷

I'd guess Ecosia is in a similar situation. I've personally been using Kagi for a while but recent events make me consider moving to a European alternative too.

[–] MoonlightFox@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Kagi also used Yandex the russian searching index btw.

I think this sounds promising https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/

[–] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah but I think Kagi is a meta search engine, so at least the technical dependency on Yandex is limited 🤞

I also have high hope for the Ecosia x Qwant project but I don't think there is any specific funding yet, so it's just about sharing Qwant's advancement on building its index 🫤 Let's stop wasting all our money on AI and let's build our own datacenters and raise enough funding for a few dozens more search engineers!

[–] MoonlightFox@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

I assume they pay Yandex for access to their index. I was a bit interested in trying Kagi a year ago or something until I heard about that. I really don't want any of my money to fuel the Russian war economy.

Want have been building their own index for many years, and I don't think they rely that heavily on Bing anymore. They have some articles about it.

[–] Elrecoal19_0@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

iirc Ecosia and Qwant were working on a search engine to substitute Google, or at least give it competition

[–] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah that's what was announced but sadly I don't think any consequent investment has been made.