[tweetle_beetle]

It's a noble effort, but they're so late to the game that it's hard to see them making a significant dent. I hope I'm wrong.

They were:

> aiming to serve 30% of French search queries [by end of 2025]

https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/

[johnofthesea]

Better late than never.

> The French index is at an advanced stage of completion, we have started creating the German language index, and the English one should start shortly. All progress is quickly integrated into the Qwant STAAN API.

https://noc.social/@327ppm/115934198650900394

[blell]

They can build whatever they want with lots of #hashtags and public money, but that doesn't mean they'll get 30% of French people to use it.

But of course they managed to cut themselves a nice salary with EU funds, paid in part by me and you, so that's all that matters.

[Gigachad]

I feel like soon there won’t even be a point having a search engine since almost the entire internet will be useless AI slop.

[altairprime]

It's as though full-text search of websites you've never heard of was a mistake :)

PageRank wouldn't exist without webrings, directories, and forums you could only search individually, and we thrived on that Internet.

Welcome back, ye olde Internet.

[direwolf20]

A search engine doesn't have to search the entire internet. Most of them are extremely opinionated about what they index.

[anal_reactor]

Seriously though. Five years ago Google already became unusable without "site:reddit.com" which is actually hilarious for a search engine that's supposed to search the entire internet. Nowadays reddit is also shit, which means that the only use case for me to use Google or any search engine is to find products that for some reason I don't want to buy on Amazon.

Internet isn't a global village, it's a global ghetto, and it's becoming increasingly true that the only way not to lose is not to play.

[baubino]

The old internet is still there. It hasn‘t gone away; it‘s just undiscoverable with ad-based search. The more slop there is, the more necessary it is to have good search engines.