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Resurrecting Qwant: New Owners Bet On GenAI To Provide Answers

Excerpt:

"Frankly, in 2019, building a search engine was not affordable for Qwant and it never was," he said. "The mistake was not to explain that and try to hide it. Qwant has been focused on privacy. And the team had worked hard on a solution with Microsoft that meant it didn't share data with Microsoft."

Even now, New Qwant will need a 3rd party to help with long-tail search results. Still, the transformation at New Qwant was underway when Microsoft dropped a bomb: It was dramatically raising its search API rates. This change also hit other search engines like Ecosia that relied on Bing.

"18 months ago, Microsoft changed access to Bing's search API," he said. "They increased the price without any good reason. All of us realized that we were so dependent on Microsoft that their strategy change could kill us. We decided we should not be in the passenger side but that we should be in the driver's seat."

So Qwant and Ecosia teamed up to create a 50-50 joint venture called the European Search Perspective (EUSP). Qwant will transfer the search indexing infrastructure it was building as well as some of its engineers and data scientists. Ecosia is making a cash contribution."

frenchtechjournal.com/resurrec
#Qwant #Ecosia #SearchEngine #EuropeanAlternatives

The French Tech Journal · Resurrecting Qwant: New Owners Bet On GenAI To Provide AnswersQwant CEO Olivier Abecassis: "We believed – and we still believe – that with GenAI some opportunities would appear if can find the right combination of technology and experience. [Now] we have a shareholder who is willing to fund that work."

The #FollowFriday tradition is a popular social media practice that has spread to various platforms, including Mastodon. The idea of recommending interesting accounts to follow every Friday started on Twitter in 2009. You can use the hashtag #FollowFriday or just #FF. This idea quickly became popular and spread to other social media platforms, including Mastodon it isn’t different.

Our #FollowFriday posts are a great way to suggest people follow great companies, non-profits, founders and open-source projects that have created and built brilliant European alternatives to foreign products and services.

We propose a new theme on a weekly basis, and to that effect here is a list of accounts to be followed on Mastodon for those interested in email providers and search engines:

✉️ E-mail providers:

1- Tuta @Tutanota 🇩🇪
2- Iroco @iroco 🇫🇷
3- Runbox @runbox 🇳🇴
4- Mailbox.org @mailbox_org 🇩🇪
5- Eclipso @eclipso 🇩🇪
6- StartMail @startmail 🇳🇱 🇺🇸
7- Mailo @hellomailo 🇫🇷
8- Hostpoint @hostpoint 🇨🇭
9- Proton @protonprivacy 🇨🇭
10- Mailfence @mailfence 🇧🇪

🔎 Search engines:

1- MetaGer @MetaGer
2- Swisscows @Swisscows 🇨🇭
3- Leta (by Mullvad) @mullvadnet 🇸🇪
4- Marginalia @marginalia 🇸🇪
5- ZoTop (by Zaclys) @zaclys 🇫🇷
6- Monocles @monocles 🇩🇪
7- Startpage @StartpageSearch 🇳🇱 🇺🇸
8- OohDirectory @OohDirectory 🇬🇧
9- Feedle @feedle 🇩🇪 (blogs and podcasts)
10- Mojeek @Mojeek 🇬🇧
11- Qwant @Qwant 🇫🇷 (inactive)

https://ueeu.vivaldi.net/2025/04/18/followfriday-on-mastodon-e-mail-providers-and-search-engines/

All Europeans 🇪🇺 · #FollowFriday on Mastodon: E-mail providers and search enginesA list of accounts to be followed on Mastodon for those interested in email providers and search engines
AI is an Orwellian nightmare

I used to be able to search for things using a search engine. It would point me to a source of information, I could decide for myself if the source was good or not. But not anymore. Recently I just wasted a lot of time trying to find something using a search engine only to get lost in an ocean of AI slop.

I finally gave in and asked my question to ChatGPT and it answered my question perfectly, it even showed me where it got it’s sources of information. The places it linked me to were either no longer existent (if ever) or only vaguely related. But it at least created the appearance of citing factual sources of information, in whatever way the statistical models have been trained to give that impression to the humans who use it.

In Orwell’s novel “1984,” we saw how a single government agency took all control over information, how the staff would keep a database of facts but constantly alter these facts to fit the view of reality that their despot “Big Brother” wanted the citizens to believe. The same thing happens now with LLMs presenting a very carefully tuned image of the facts in the database.

AI chat bots are an innovative new method of brainwashing, one which nobody could have ever imagined possible even a few years ago: get everyone to trust a mechanical Big Brother because it chats with you like a friendly fellow human would.

(Full article here.)

tilde.townRamin Honary: AI is an Orwellian nightmare
#AI#tech#internet

It's crazy that in the context of my #web experience, @marginalia went from a fun but ultimately impractical diversion to literally the only way the #internet is browsable for me now.

Try using any #searchEngine to look up any broad question that's #tech, #household or #life related. Almost all results will be extremely verbose, LLM generated, pointless (and/or product ads).

On #Marginalia, I found real, human-written and most importantly, *useful* information immediately.

Continued thread

🧵 And now, the part 4 or my series of articles on how to build a #crossplatform #searchengine, in #rustlang.

📰 This article is about how we query the indexes, aggregate the results and generate some scores.

💬 Enjoy reading it, feel free to provide me some feedback, here or directly on GitHub 😃

:fediverse: If you enjoy it, feel free to share it on other platforms!

🔗 Here is the link: jdrouet.github.io/posts/202503

jdrouet · Building a search engine from scratch, in Rust: part 4Or how we'll find something in all this.

#SiliconValley #AI tech startup #CEO gets #prison sentence after scamming million$ from #investors for #YouPlus video #Analytics #SearchEngine whose proprietary magic tech was just underpaid contract workers in India returning #PowerPoints #marketing info.

• The startup was founded by Shaukat Shamim alongwith India-based Krishna Prasad Nadig

• Founder raised $17 Mn in VC money for bogus " video opinion search engine"

• Instead of AI tech, the company was paying workers in #India to watch videos and faked #banking statements, bilked investors for personal expenses like luxury clothing & eyewear, and duty-free shopping splurges.

sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ceo

SFGATE · Bay Area tech startup CEO gets prison time for lying about productBy Madilynne Medina