That article is from 2024, two years ago. STAAN (the search index) is up and running for a few months now.
Ecosia’s French users started getting search results from the index last year. Recently the German users got switched over to the index as well.
While this is definitely good news, it’s also two years old news. EUSP has been taken in use in France since last year, and this year it expanded to Germany.
- https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
- https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp-germany-rollout/
PS: In case some of you have used/tried Ecosia, and have been annoyed by the existence of the AI button, you can now disable it in the settings.
Germany rollout was last week. That is still news.
Ive ecosia to give lackluster search results though
Of course depending on what you are searching for
I have ecosia as standard and put my query in DuckDuckGo if Ecosia doesn’t get me good results. Barely ever am i in need of a third engine and this extra effort is definitely worth it compared to the drawbacks of using Google.
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Providing a search API is currently a hot business because coding agents need that. See for example https://exa.ai/
I wonder why EUSP does not aggressively target that market?
I don’t think that Ecosia would consider this given what they stand for. They are mainly focussing on being a strong alternative to Google
Ecosia have specifically mentioned AI to be users of the index.
From the frontpage of EUSP
This index will be an alternative results provider for a diverse set of small search engines, startups and the European Data / AI industry.
I don’t understand why “what they stand for” would be an argument? They are not anti-AI, as they offer one themselves.
They aren’t anti-AI, but their main mission is also environmental. Including Mistral Small as a optional chat in the search engine, in my view, is still a few steps removed from agressively marketing to Agentic search
Another argument might be monitization, if they don’t receive money for using their api they cannot plant trees.
That is an argument in favor. For example, Brave charges 5$ per 1000 requests. It is an additional way of earning money by not just selling to Qwant and Ecosia exclusively.
First the index, now this. Good to see progress.
I feel their products are already quite good (yes, yes they are not perfect for use case X and Y). Perhaps it is time to invest a bit more time building awareness.
Hope their results get better. Unfortunately many times I have to rely on Google for the better results, which is weird since they use Google as engine… Maybe Bing is screwing it up
