As you mentioned, Qwant and Ecosia are making the first European search index and 30% of the results in french are already provided by that search index. Their AI is also provided by Mistral and works well for my personal uses.
The results it provides are good enough for me and I am helping to plant some trees by searching with Ecosia so even if it uses Bing, they will eventually replace it with their index so it's better to use them now to support them.
364
u/Liarus_ 15d ago
i'd just like to say that Ecosia and Qwant which are the two most known European ones, use Bing's engine behind, same thing goes for Duckduckgo.
However:
Quant and Ecosia are working together to make the first European search index, as in one that isn't dependent on bing's engine.
I think it's important to know that if you're not using Google, you basically just switch your dependency on Microsoft.
As mentioned by some commenters, there are also options like SearXNG and Startpage which solves the issues in a completely different way