European search engines seek domestic control, taking on Google

London: Christian Kroll has long worried about Europe's dependence on US Big Tech, but now the head of German search engine Ecosia has a new tool to take on Google and Microsoft.

Ecosia, which uses advertising profits from its 20 million users to plant trees, has partnered with French privacy-focused search engine Qwant to create an index -- the back-end database behind search engines -- separate from Google Search and Microsoft's Bing.

Kroll and Qwant head Olivier Abecassis hope the new index, the European Search Perspective (EUSP), will give European companies more control over what they show users.

The index, unveiled in late 2024 and due to launch this year, could be used to prioritise sustainable choices in travel and shopping, for example.

"In Europe we've relied on energy from (Russian President) Vladimir Putin, and now we're relying on digital technology from (US President-elect) Donald Trump," Kroll said.

"If the US should cut off access to these important technologies, we in Europe would have to go back to phone books. There is nothing that can replace many of Google or Microsoft's services at the moment," Kroll added.

The EUSP project has been given a boost by legal challenges to tech monopolies in Europe and the United States.

In August 2024, US District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated antitrust law by spending billions of dollars to secure a monopoly position.

The Department of Justice is pushing for Google to sell its Chrome browser or share data and search results with rivals.

Google has said the move would be "unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers, and small businesses."

Meanwhile, the European Union's Digital Markets Act, which came into effect in 2023, requires Google to share data that would be useful for training a search model.

Search Sovereignty

Google currently has just under 90 per cent of the search engine market, according to web analytics firm Statcounter, while Bing just under 4%.

Other search engines licence results from these giants at a high price.

Abecassis told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that a tipping point came when Microsoft increased costs for Bing Search access in February 2023, threatening Qwant's 6 million users.

"We were not driving the car. We were sitting in the passenger seat, and (any)thing could happen. We need to be more independent," Abecassis said.

In response, Qwant began organising data from webpages, ordering them based on search terms – a process known as 'ranking'.

In addition to reducing users' dependence on Big Tech, the new EUSP index will allow search engines to rank search results based on their own priorities, moving away from current practice.

For example, Ecosia could rank train travel higher than flights and boost the visibility of shopping options that use sustainable materials.

"If we use the Google or Bing result, we are obliged to display the result in the same order," Kroll said. "We might have opportunities to add a widget here and there, but it's not the same as fundamentally changing the content."

Algorithmic black box

The hope is that the new index will also provide a viable alternative search experience to Google and Bing, which have come under criticism over the years.

Jutta Haider, professor of information studies at Sweden's University of Borås, said popular search engines have an "unmistakable consumerist bias" given they make money by connecting sellers and buyers and facilitating consumption -- a top contributor to carbon emissions.

Her studies suggest Google Search's algorithm lacks transparency and could be nudging people to make less climate-friendly choices by suggesting terms like 'flight', 'buying' and 'quick' when users search for travel information, for example.

A search for 'Amsterdam Paris' on Google, for instance, prioritises car travel and flights over train travel. Bing also defaults to showing the driving distance.

Meanwhile, Qwant's first results are links to train ticket websites and Ecosia shows a widget of train journeys from booking website Omio.

Asked about the criticism of bias, a Google spokesperson said its search product helped people find "the most relevant, high quality information."

"If people are looking for more sustainable travel, we provide easy-to-use tools to help them find options such as rail travel and compare those to similar flights," the spokesperson said in an email.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Gen AI

Abecassis and Kroll are also hoping to harness the power of generative artificial intelligence.

Ecosia Chat, a text-based generative AI tool that links with OpenAI's ChatGPT, can be prompted behind-the-scenes to provide greener solutions to users' queries, while Kroll said the EUSP would give Ecosia Chat access to real-time information.

But Haider warned that gen-AI tools tend to have the same consumerist bias as search engines and their biases are more oblique, given the source of their information is sometimes unclear.

AI tools have also been criticised for having a high environmental cost, given they consume more power to operate than traditional search models.

Kroll told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that Ecosia Chat is powered by solar energy, and that developing its generative AI chatbot will result in a 5 per cent increase in Ecosia's carbon emissions.

"Ecosia plans to invest further in solar, regenerative agriculture, and other nature-based solutions to the climate crisis, to account for this carbon footprint," he said.

"However, market vendors like OpenAI do not share this carbon impact information with their customers. Calculating the carbon cost of switching search functionality to a generative AI-based one is not currently as transparent as we'd like. To rectify this, we need greater transparency from Big Tech on the carbon impact of this technology."

OpenAI did not respond to the Thomson Reuters Foundation's request for comment.