Imagine if we could dispense with Google and switch to a less commercial, easier to use and more privacy-respecting internet search engine.
Which is to say, a service like the old Google, launched 26 years ago on the nascent internet’s founding principle that “Information wants to be free.”
Today’s Google is cluttered and cumbersome. It has become a jumble of advertising and “sponsored” search results, sometimes stacked six high above the first real search result.
Like most websites, Google collects user data. But with its enormous user base and its business model of turning the data it collects into revenue, Google amasses a fantastic amount of data from its more than 37 million Canadian users — and over 5 billion worldwide.
Google provided enough data on users’ shopping habits, parenting methods, driving behaviour and other personal details to advertisers and other clients last year to generate a $132 billion (U.S.) profit for its parent, Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet market cap is larger than Canadian economy
With a stock market capitalization of $4.2 trillion — larger than the size of the Canadian economy — Alphabet, based in Mountain View, Calif., is among the most valuable companies on Earth.
That’s measured in dollars. Google’s value in terms of user experience has been increasingly found wanting in recent years.
Google is overloaded. It is a giant information retrieval service, of course, processing about 5 trillion search queries a year. And in attaining a near-monopoly in internet search, with a market share in the range of 85 per cent, Google has also become a shopping mall, an encyclopedia, a world atlas and an image bank (including pictures, via Google Maps, of your front porch).
“Using Google once felt like magic,” the Atlantic said in a profile of the company three years ago. “Now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers.”
Since then, Google has invested heavily in AI to restructure its service. But that has alienated some Google users, who describe the search engine results as more chaotic. All that AI gadgetry, some say, can make it a chore to use.
That can be partly explained by the rapid pace at which Google is launching new products in Big Tech’s race for AI supremacy. “We’re open to the fact that we are going to need to make changes very quickly,” Varun Mohan, a director at Google DeepMind, the firm’s AI development centre, said at a company event in May.
“Otherwise, we are going to have a product that is old for our users,” he said.
Concerned about data vulnerability, France’s Assemblée Nationale and its armed forces ministry replaced Google in 2018 with Qwant, a search engine hosted in France that now operates in approximately 30 countries.
And in June, the European Union replaced Google with Qwant on computer workstations at the European Parliament, the legislative arm of the EU.
Privacy wasn’t the only issue.
The switch was also made “in line with the Parliament’s commitment to digital sovereignty,” the Parliament explained.
Defecting from Google is part of a “tech sovereignty” package under development by the EU, under pressure from its member countries to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants.
Today’s heightened national security concerns have made European governments uneasy that so much European personal, business and government data is stored on U.S. computer servers.
Qwant’s key differentiator is its no-tracking policy. In contrast to Google, Qwant does not use tracking cookies and doesn’t store users’ search histories or create user profiles.
That means Qwant search results are not influenced by the previous searches or browsing habits of its six million monthly active users. Users are liberated from the feedback loops, or “filter bubbles,” where content is pushed at them by algorithms tailored to their user profiles.
Search experts say Google is still better at complex queries, but that Qwant and other alternatives are fine for many everyday searches. Qwant is expanding with the backing of the French government and the European Investment Bank.
And because its infrastructure is entirely located in Europe, Qwant is not subject to U.S surveillance laws such as the CLOUD Act.
Creating our own ‘Google’ would aid Canada’s digital sovereignty
The Qwant model recommends itself to Canada, whose own regulation of online activity is underway.
The timing is ideal for incorporating in that strategy a Canadian-made privacy-focused search engine whose data storage and software technology reside in Canada, insulated from the U.S.
“We could rip a page from the EU and think about what digital infrastructure we want our governments to be reliant on, and how we can raise the bar,” argues Vass Bednar, managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute, a digital policy think tank. “We can search for better alternatives, or we can make them.”
That initiative would create a world-class technology with export potential. And it would advance Canada’s digital sovereignty ambitions while restoring a greater measure of privacy to Canadians in their internet use.
