Search without Google

The default search box on every European browser sends 90% of queries to Google. The other 10% mostly goes to Microsoft Bing. Both companies are American, both train AI on what you search for, both decide what counts as "the web".

Below this paragraph is the European answer to that. It's smaller, slower, less polished — but it exists, it's growing, and it does not need your search history to fund itself.

One thing worth knowing first: most European "alternatives" still use Bing's index under the hood. Qwant, Ecosia, and swisscows pay Microsoft for search results and add a privacy layer on top. That's not nothing — your queries stop leaking to Google, the ad targeting goes away, the cookies get simpler. But Microsoft still sees the search.

Mojeek is the rare exception — a UK company crawling its own index since 2004. Smaller result set, genuinely European-owned. If "no American dependency" matters to you, that's the only honest pick on this page.

Below: six European search engines. None of them will beat Google for finding the right Stack Overflow answer. All of them let you search without a US company building a profile of what you wonder about.