Technology

Look... Doesn't that feel kind of like self-pitying rot to anyone here? Why are we dependent on US technology? Because we are so ethical and pure...

Here's the truth.

In the late 90s, a German student created a search engine in Germany. It was a little thing. It only scraped a few hundred media outlets. You signed up, defined some keywords, and when an article matching those keywords was published, you received a notification.

He immediately was sued and forced to shut down under copyright law. Google could operate in the US under Fair Use.

Eventually, years later search engines were legalized in Germany (and the EU). But by then the Internet was dominated by US companies. It makes no sense to spend billions to build a European Google that does exactly what Google already does.

The reason that there is no European Google is that we insist that information must be owned. No data processing without the explicit consent of the owner. Which means, we insist that some intellectual property owners should be allowed to extract rent from us all.

There’s actually pretty many to choose from.

Ones I’ve tried:

• https://www.ecosia.org/ (🇩🇪) I’ve found this to work best for me

• https://www.qwant.com/ (🇫🇷) also good, but I find the ads sometimes too distracting

• https://www.startpage.com/ (🇳🇱) also good

others:

• https://www.mojeek.com/ (🇬🇧) if you like the brits… but really, who does?! 😅
• https://good-search.org/ (🇩🇪) interesting
• https://swisscows.com/ (🇨🇭) lol

Honestly, just switch your default search engine in your phone-settings and see what happens. After a while you don’t even realize you’re not using Google anymore. And if you’re not pleased with the search result (which I rarely am these days, using ecosia) see if Google gives a better answer. Mostly not. Happy experimenting! ;)

Because a couple of years ago everyone thought it was stupid to consider needing one.

Probably a big part of it is the internet emerged from the USA and Silicon Valley already was a strong tech hub in the 90s when it really started becoming worldwide. Back in the 80s and into the early 90s UK used to also to have a pretty big concentration of talent but for some reason that started going away as the 90s progressed.

Ecosia and Qwant are trying to change that, but it's an uphill fight.

https://www.eu-searchperspective.com/

Because, generally speaking, Europe has this thing called laws, and the government arguably exists to protect it's "citizens".

In the US you have this thing called lobbyists and the government unilaterally exists, only to protect it's "corporations"

For example, in Europe McDonald's French fries contain 3 ingredients (potato, salt, oil) and in the US there are around 20 ingredients... The US adds all that extra shit to make the frier oil last longer, to make it easier to clean, etc. and fuck you for being poor if it gives you cancer.

Europe has better frameworks in place to prevent robber barons, this is just as true for the digital age as it was 200 years ago.

Because Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu already exist.

Any new competition starting up now would need really deep pockets to compete for the decade or so it would take to make any sort of profit.

Qwant (french) got its own indexing.

Edit: the linked article isn't about search engines but big tech companies.

https://www.mojeek.com/

100% UK based and unlike Startpage and Qwant . . .uses 100% it's own crawlers.

Be warned: you will NOT get the same results as Google, Bing, Startpage . . Sometimes that's helpful . . sometimes not.

It's because creating a system that supports start ups and investment in them is hard. Creating one that also protects citizens is even harder. You need to strike the right balance between regulation and letting companies do what they want. You need to offer right protections for investors. You need fast working, predictable legal system. Doing all this is difficult and many countries are not great at it. EU is not great at it. US managed to do it.

For example, one of very promising EU startups, Gowex, turned out to be total scam. The laws in Spain, weak control mechanism and reporting requirements allowed it to mislead investors for years. When it collapsed a lot of people lost a lot of money and investment in startups in EU slowed down. The regulations simply weren't good enough.

Courts operate faster and more consistent in system based on common low. That's why UK was the financial capital of Europe (until brexit) and that's why US was able to develop huge corporations.

In EU for a long time most companies were financed by banks. There were simply not many tools to get investment from other sources.

All this combines means that EU was a slowly moving but stable market that was good at creating regulations protected citizens but not so good at protecting investors. US on the other hand had a system great at protecting investors while completely ignoring its citizens. That's why.

Big techs are a problem. Should we worry that Europe does not have this problem at home?

Everything would be better if we had many smaller companies and organizations doing this stuff instead of just a few, but huge.

https://www.startpage.com/ is based in the Netherlands, works really well too in my opinion. I've been using it ever since I started actively avoiding Google.

Edit: One caveat is that it's majorly owned by an American parent company.

I always wonder what people actually mean by „European Google“ because every single Google service already has a European equivalent, some of which are very popular already like Proton Mail.

Because Europe was complacent and never imagined the US and big tech would become so fucking unhinged.

Use searx and host it yourself, then it's also 'European based'