Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech
Nowadays the bulk of linking goes to ecommerce sites (amazon) from content farms (reddit) and all those sites are submitted directly to Google. I don't think crawlable internet exists anymore.
You can ask Icann [0] access to gTld domain list files (if you have a legitimate reason to do so). Once access you are granted access to a gTld, you can download a compressed csv file with a line per couple <domain, nameserver>.
Examples of American cultural attitudes permeating social media platforms that have felt very odd in Europe: Firearms and violence (which is apparently allowed), and nudity (which is apparently always sexual).
The concerns about the current direction of EU regulation are valid and huge, I get that.
The most glaring and obvious example is the narrative surrounding race/gender relations. The EU has it's own racial issues but we get BLM riots too and we get chest thumping misandrists in Sweden.. the country that has done the most to promote gender equality of any nation on the planet.
BLM riots don't make sense in the UK for example, our race relations are much more nuanced, difficult, and probably put the Pakistani community in the most visibly disadvantaged position; but there's no space to talk about that as we're discussing George Floyd and police brutality (which, largely is not a UK issue at all).
I know for Americans this might come off as tone deaf because everything over there is so polarised it's like a battle to the death; but I think a major reason the right wing is growing in the EU is because of US cultural norms becoming prevalent (individualism over collectivism) and that naturally comes with some amount of xenophobia; as if you're living an individualistic mindset you naturally see resources as zero-sum.
The growth of right-wing movements thrive, ironically, by positioning themselves as a bulwark against what they frame as foreign cultural encroachment. It seems we're stuck trying to choose between a censored European world or an American one that doesn't fit us at all.
But if I have to choose, I choose the one that actually sort of fits.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people around you adopt US mentality, problems and problem solving. This can be simple things like talking to the police, ignoring the fact that there's a huge difference in talking to a police officer in Gothenburg vs. Baltimore. Some times you even run into people protesting something that's not a problem, but US centric social media has lead them to believe it is. At the same time many are completely oblivious to local issues.
Our local right-wingers want to shut down our equivalent to the education department because “they are too woke”. Meanwhile those same “nationalists” want to stop funding local culture in favor of importing US culture.
This is in Finland of all places. I’m tired of our local social media drones going crazy over US nonsense but our right-wing parties want more of it.
The global cultural influence of the US is really showing and it’s going to be a wild ride as the world shifts to reject it as that influence starts turning against us.
What is American is the endless need to slap a scary label on it, turn it into a culture war football, and export the outrage everywhere else. We’ve been talking about equality, workers' rights, and anti-discrimination in Europe for over a century without needing Fox News to tell us it's dangerous. Now suddenly our own politicians are parroting this imported panic as if it were homegrown wisdom.
That's not to absolve Americans at all, but rather to reinforce the idea that the EU should reign over those platforms in the EU, and/or promote its own.
Even on here on somewhat technical discussions it's pretty much very visible what the US point of view is.
Did Qwants already work on an index?
Even for established players these have value because the index gets stale quickly for certain queries that many people care about a lot. Even though that value isn't fungible, or enough to break even if it were, it's the kind of value that keeps the search engine competitive.
We will see which kind of data privacy they will go for this time.
- The one that puts the data subject in the focus and protects the end user
- The one that aims to cut out Google and tries to hand out pieces of the cake to European companies.
It doesn't look like your usual search page and I had the feeling I'm not on the main page at all.
I'll still try it as my new default FF search engine since google got really bad in the past months.
I don't see the point. What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish? The chat control plans, the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Digital Services Act, the militarization - none of it seems to be democratic tied to any values surrounding freedom.
Without you own search engines (or tech companies in general) you depend on third parties and become basically a puppet.
If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
So I agree with you, but the premises are quite restrictive.
I agree that the Chat Control plans are bad, however do you think that particular concern is better handled in China or the US? Also note they are not the law specifically because of active democracy.
The other points you mentioned I don’t see how they are anti democratic.
They just try to push it through when people are occupied with something else, which is very unfortunate (and they (who?) should be punished for it, I would want a society that "cancels" these politicians immediately for supporting such an anti-freedom policy), but that's it.
The EU is still a shining beacon of democracy in the world.
what democracy? Yeah some of them have it but not EU and all.
It’s gaining momentum again, so let’s not rest on past victories.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-2b-dual-tranche-note...
I do agree with your overall point.
Did you think that comparison through? :)
I also like this as a platform for my own ideas. I think search (also RAG) is shit and that we need longer, higher quality vector representations of texts, and if I develop one I could potentially convince the people running this to try it.
The quoted part doesn't say anything about "freedom", are you sure that maybe your perspective (coming from the US I guess?) matches with the values Europeans want?
Personally, I want more of my computing, in every sense, to be closer to me. Ideally in Spain, but OK within EU too, so if there are no search indexes run by EU entities, then that's something we should improve.
First, the claim is that it strengthens democratic control. I can't see how you could be against that.
Second, the more, the merrier. In this case, more search indices means more search freedom. If your country censors something, you can try another index. But only if that index actually exists, and falls under different rules.
If nothing else, how do you think various LLMs using tools are doing their web searching?
Besides, plenty of people resort to traditional searches for various reasons, often because LLMs aren't happy to talk about any topic, while search engines usually lets you search for pretty much whatever you want.
Humans are already unfortunately prone to bullshitting and bloviating, but they are also used to dealing with other humans: there's no need to add an additional layer of both from a black box which does not behave like one.
1317•7h ago
usr1106•6h ago
aziaziazi•5h ago
> We’re aiming to serve 50% of French search queries by the end of the year, and will soon start rolling out to other countries.