HN discussion Moving away from US cloud services | Hacker News
Startpage is not Dutch owned. It is registered in The Netherlands but owned by system1. The writer seems uninformed.
Yeah. Looking at the authors X account they seem more interested in making the front page of HN then anything else.
Mojeek is the only search engine that makes sense as a US competitor. It doesn’t rely on US infrastructure or US search engines. It’s all completely controlled by them in the UK. Duckduckgo, Startpage, Ecosia, and all the usual suspects are Bing / Google proxies. Brave is a US company.
I guess there’s Yandex…
Qwant and Ecosia are working on their own search engine.
More info HERE
Great list. About Bitwarden, it has an option to store your data in Europe when selecting bitwarden.eu so you can keep using it without the fear of relying on US infrastructures
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Same for 1Password
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Something being on EU infra does not expell it legally from the US interfering with it. This is a false narrative. It is the same trouble with i.e. using AWS servers in Europe.
Besides that this initiative is also meant to push for EU’s own tech. This won’t help there either.
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I’m aware of the Ecosia and Qwant joint venture, and it’s exciting. It would be great to see another independent European search engine a few years down the line!
On Ecosia's business model
@Regime6045 Since you reacted to my comment with 
(confusion), allow me to explain my reasoning.
In 2022, I considered using Ecosia. Naturally, the first thing I did was read the privacy policy, and I found that for every query, they needed to send part of the searcher’s IP address to Bing.
Ecosia Privacy Policy Excerpt From March 2022
"We use elements of Microsoft Bing’s search index to deliver
results. We never communicate IP addresses along with search
queries. We only send IP addresses to Microsoft in obfuscated form,
meaning we remove parts of the IP address when we store it. For
example 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX. "
When I asked Ecosia about this directly, they told me that Microsoft required all Bing proxies to send Bing an obfuscated version of the IP address. They then linked me to this helpdesk article to find Microsoft’s privacy policy: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657811
It’s gone now, but here’s an archive: How does Ecosia use profits from ad income to finance tree planting? – Ecosia's FAQ
This was not reassuring. I understand obfuscated IP addresses are necessary to prevent spam and it would be harder for Microsoft to correlate queries with me than with a full IP address, but it just didn’t sit right with me - though perhaps not for the reasons you might think.
It really drove home how Ecosia has no power in their relationship with Microsoft. If Microsoft decides to cut off Bing API access tomorrow, Ecosia’s entire business is gone. Some Bing proxies refer to Microsoft as a “partner” (if they mention them at all), but that implies equal footing. Microsoft does not think of any of these companies as partners - they’re distributors. If you’ve ever been a distributor, you know the dynamics of this relationship.
Microsoft tells you what you can and can’t do, and they change the rules on a whim. Like a few years ago, when they suddenly increased the API price by several multiples, which forced Kagi to knock up their prices.
Or how they restrict what ad networks their distributors can use; they are only allowed to use Microsoft’s ad network with their search results.
Or how they restrict what results their distributors can combine with Bing’s results - or even how they rank them.
Bing proxies are not an alternative to Bing. They exist to serve Microsoft’s interests and only Microsoft’s interests.
Brave Search (or Cliqz, Tailcat, whatever) has managed to circumvent the rules and costs entirely while still relying on Google/Bing results with the clever strategy of getting users to install the extension/opt into the Web Search Discovery Project. It’s a strategy that can only really work when you partner with a browser.
Ecosia’s strategy of building their own independent search engine like Brave Search is the only way to get out of the thumb of Microsoft. The current political climate has provided the perfect opportunity for this venture. So I wish them luck, and hope for more independent indexes in the future.