wired.com/story/ecosia-qwant-e…
Guess we’re gonna witness the creation of the digital European Coal and Steel Union
The for-profit joint venture …
Oh well.
It gets worse:
The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines — including and especially around generative AI — as well as reducing dependence on search indexes
Exactly what we need, more A"I" generated bullshit, because there isn’t enough of that already.
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@maniacalmanicmania well, companies can make money without abusing user privacy if they so want. It’s been done before.
In related news, search engine Google just announced to roll out a test that gets rid of results from news publishers based in the EU.
This test will affect 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. We will continue to show results from other websites, including news publishers based outside the EU. We intend to use this test to assess how results from EU news publishers impact the search experience for our users and traffic to publishers.
G does not say when the test will end.
As we know, Google has threatened to pull news links in Canada in response to the Online News Act of 2023 which forced all tech companies to come out with compensation related to linked content with any online news publisher. After months of negotiations, Google agreed to pay $100M each year to Canadian news organizations afaik.
A similar incident happened in California in the U.S. where Google briefly removed links to California news outlets in response to the proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA). The new law would force Google to pay publishers in return for using links to their pages. For now, the bill is yet to be confirmed but Google managed to strike a deal with lawmakers this summer.
Maybe that provided some additional context.
I would be curious to learn more about their revenue model, the article doesn’t say about it. The good thing is that there are no financial investors involved as far as we can learn from the read, it will be interesting to see how this develops imho.
