Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Europe already has a great, European-made alternative to Google - it's called Yandex

Much has been made of Europe's desire [and in particular of France] to have its own Web search engine, to [rightfully] reduce the dependence on America's Google and Bing, for cultural, economic and even national security reasons. Barring one product, there aren't decent European alternatives to American search giants. If dirty politics and foreign policy had not come in the way, the quest of Europeans for a European search engine would have [happily] ended long back at the one exception - the great search engine called Yandex.

Yandex, a powerful search engine from the exemplary computer scientists, programmers, mathematicians and researchers at Yandex LLC [the topmost technology company of Russia] is also available in English [apart from some other languages], and brief usage quickly indicates to anyone that it's a very good search engine.

Europe doesn't need Quaero. What Europe needs is more localized versions of Yandex [French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, etc.]. European nations such as France, Germany, etc., could've setup local branches of Yandex, and could've funded these local branches instead of trying to reinvent the wheel from scratch in the very costly game of Web search.

Update [3-Oct-17]: Qwant is wrong when it says that it is the only European search engine.


No comments:

Post a Comment