Ask the Ecosia search engine about “Paris to Prague” and flight booking portals dominate the results. Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to present more train options that he considers better for the environment. However, because the results are licensed from Microsoft’s Google and Bing, Ecosia has little control over what is displayed. Kroll is ready to change that.
Berlin-based Ecosia, which donates its profits to planting trees, and its Paris-based competitor Qwant announce on Tuesday that they will join forces to develop an online index.
This for-profit joint venture, called European Search Perspective, based in Paris, could allow compact businesses and anyone else who decides to join to reduce their dependence on Google and Bing and display results better suited to their companies’ missions and the tastes of Europeans. “We could downgrade the performance of unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” Kroll says of eco-friendly company Ecosia.
Losing some licensing revenue won’t be a gigantic blow to Microsoft and Google, which together own about 95 percent of the global search industry outside China. But at a time when services like ChatGPT and TikTok are already redefining how users search, compact rivals that potentially become more attractive to users could force larger companies to accelerate their investments in regional updates.
Ownership of European Search Perspective (EUSP) will be divided equally between Ecosia and Qwant, with Ecosia providing the cash and data and Qwant providing the labor. The technical infrastructure will come from OVHcloud, which is owned by Qwant. Ecosia has about 1 percent search market share in France and Germany and has around 20 million users worldwide, while Qwant reports around 6 million users.
For Ecosia and Qwant, capturing more of the world beyond French and German-speaking users will require success at home and growing revenues, which largely come from advertising. The challenge is obvious. Ecosia sales, in accordance with its disclosuresdecreased by 8 percent to €24.2 million in the first nine months of this year compared to the same period in 2023. We do not guarantee that more precise results will assist your business grow – ads are still provided by Microsoft and Google. Kroll says that will change soon.
The companies are open to both obtaining external financing for the EUSP and licensing its index to other companies, including those that might want to utilize the data to train artificial intelligence systems. “We are bringing together the most experienced search engineers to create sovereign technology in Europe – especially for French and German, and we are absolutely confident that this will appeal to the investment community,” says Kroll.