The European Parliament will this week replace Google with France’s Qwant – a European alternative search engine – as the default on its computers, according to an email seen by Euractiv.
Just think about how much Google being the default search engine for the EU parliament enabled the USA to spy on the parliament. Everything some MEP searches is going through some NSA data center. And try to imagine how much information the USA can get from that
Tech bros. entering the find out stage.
We were talking about this at lunch today at work, that Qwant is better than Google because Google evil, and Ecosia’s search results are garbage. So several of my colleagues have switched to Qwant. I guess I’ll follow suit. Not sure what to gain from moving from DuckDuckGo though. Qwant has its own index maybe?
DDG is still US tech though. If the goal is to use European, DDG is a no-go.
Speaking of US tech, Qwant has Amazon and Adidas as sponsors? 💀 They are prominently displayed on the Qwant front page when using its mobile app…
Take their money, abandon their tech. I’ve been boycotting Amazon for years and I don’t see a problem.
It’s easy for us to say when we never even use the services or products of those companies.
What if it said “Support Genocide” instead. Still, take their money, abandon their cause? It feels very uneasy. No search engine is free, just as no tech offering is truly free.
Absolutely right, I am trying to move away from US tech.
What I absolutely can’t love without is bangs. Like !w <query> to search Wikipedia directly, for example.
But I’m starting to think I might want an add-on for this instead of relying on the search engine for it.
Ultimately we need certain internet infrastructure as free public utilities. Like a search engine backend.
free public utilities
I agree, but this will require political will. I think on lemmy people would vote for a government that creates stuff like this, but there are a lot of people want their government to spend as little as possible, unfortunately. I find it more likely we end up with a non-profit like wikipedia provides basic knowledge to the public, free of charge.
Things moving forward, slowly but surely
