Almost every search query in Europe ends up with Google or Microsoft. This article explains why that is a risk and why everyone should try Qwant and Ecosia.
Anyone looking online for news, products, doctors or tradespeople usually opens Google. According to StatCounter, just under 89 percent of all search queries in Europe go through Google and just over 5 percent through Microsoft Bing (as of September 2026). Hardly anyone asks where the results actually come from. The answer is more one sided than you might think: many search engines that are not called Google also show results from the data of Google or Microsoft.
This makes Europe dependent on two American companies for internet search. These two decide who may use their search results, at what price and for how long.
What a search index is
A search engine does not search the entire internet at the moment you press Enter. It draws on a database built in advance: the search index.
To build this index, automated programs called crawlers constantly visit billions of web pages. They read the content and store it so that it can be searched in a fraction of a second. For every query, a ranking method then decides which results appear and in what order.
Without a large and up to date index, there is no usable web search. Running one, however, is very expensive. Web pages have to be revisited all the time, and data centres, storage and network connections cost a lot of money.
Many search engines, few indexes
Because an index of your own is so expensive, most search engines do not run one. They buy their results from one of the big providers and only design the interface themselves.
DuckDuckGo gets a large part of its results from Microsoft Bing. Startpage shows results from Google. Qwant and Ecosia also relied on Bing and Google for a long time, and in part still do.
To the user, this looks like choice. In reality, almost every path leads to the same two indexes. Anyone running one of these search engines depends on Google or Microsoft continuing to deliver.
Why almost everyone ends up with Google
Google’s market share is not explained by good results alone. A large part of it comes from default settings. Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine in Safari. For 2022, the figure was around 20 billion dollars. On most Android devices and in the Chrome browser, Google was for a long time set as the default without anyone being asked.
In August 2024, a US federal court found that Google had unlawfully protected its monopoly in web search through such contracts. In September 2025, the court banned exclusive contracts of this kind. Payments for the default position, however, remain allowed. In the EU, Android and Chrome have had to show a choice of search engines during setup since March 2024. This is required by the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
So most people never consciously chose Google. They simply kept the default.
Microsoft has shown how quickly access can disappear
In May 2023, Microsoft raised the prices of its Bing Search APIs. These are the interfaces through which other providers retrieve results from Bing. Depending on the plan, costs rose by up to ten times. A provider with ten million queries a month that used to pay 10,000 dollars would afterwards have had to pay up to 100,000 dollars. For many smaller services, that simply no longer adds up.
On 11 August 2025, Microsoft shut these interfaces down completely and pointed its customers to new offerings with a stronger focus on AI. Search engines with their own partner agreements did not automatically lose their results that day. But a publicly accessible route to one of the two big indexes was gone.
Anyone without an index of their own in such a situation quickly needs another provider that fits technically and is affordable. Nobody builds an index of their own in a few weeks. And it is not only search engines that are affected, but also research services and software with built in web search.
Whether Microsoft intended to push out competitors is not proven. The problem remains all the same: whoever owns the foundation of a market can change its rules at any time.
What the EU is doing about it
Under the Digital Markets Act, Google must provide competing search engines with anonymised search data: which terms were searched, which results appeared and which were clicked. It is precisely this data that makes Google so good, because every query shows which results are really relevant to users.
On 16 July 2026, the European Commission set out how Google must meet this obligation. From January 2027, Google must deliver the data to eligible search engines, at a price that Google calculates using a formula set by the Commission and cannot set freely. For the first time, smaller providers will see on a large scale what people search for and which results they click, and can use this to improve their own results. Google does not have to hand over the index itself or its search algorithm.
Whether the rules will help remains to be seen. Google may first check whether sharing data with a particular provider poses a serious risk to security or data protection. And the data is only useful to those who can actually turn it into better results.
Qwant and Ecosia are building a European index
The more important development comes from Europe itself. The French search engine Qwant and the German search engine Ecosia have jointly founded the company European Search Perspective (EUSP). Under the name Staan, it is building a European search index of its own.
Since 2025, Qwant has been delivering results from this index in France. Since 30 July 2026, Ecosia has also been showing results from the European index in Germany. Neither is fully independent yet. Depending on the query, they still mix in results from Bing or Google. The advertising that Ecosia earns its money with also still comes via Microsoft and Yahoo.
Other building blocks are emerging as well. The EU funded research project OpenWebSearch.EU has built an open web index as a pilot, which other companies and research institutions could also use in future. And the Czech search engine Seznam has been running an index of its own for years, proving that this is possible in Europe.
An index of your own does not solve every dependency. It needs data centres and networks, and anyone running it entirely on an American cloud provider has only moved the problem. Without an index of their own, however, European search engines cannot deliver any results of their own at all.
Using only Google means seeing only Google’s selection
Anyone who uses Google exclusively sees only what Google wants to show them. Google decides which pages appear at the top, which disappear far down the list and where advertising and Google’s own services appear. Whatever does not show up there simply does not exist for most users, because hardly anyone goes on to the second page of results. A search engine with its own index often shows different results and makes it visible that a different selection exists.
AI narrows this selection even further. Since 26 March 2025, Google has also been showing an AI summary at the very top for many search queries in Germany; Google calls it an AI Overview. It answers the question directly on the results page, without the need to open a website. In 2025, the Pew Research Center studied the effect of this in the USA. Without an AI summary, users clicked on one of the regular search results in 15 out of 100 searches. When an AI summary appeared above them, they clicked on one of the regular search results below it in only 8 out of 100 searches. The summary itself does list its sources as links, but users clicked these links in only one out of 100 searches. So in around 90 out of 100 searches with an AI summary, users did not open any website at all.
Anyone who searches this way reads a single answer that Google has put together from pages of its choosing. This answer looks as if the knowledge came from Google itself. In fact, it comes from other websites: from newsrooms, specialist portals, blogs and forums that researched and wrote the content. Because hardly anyone clicks through to these sites any more, they lose visitors and with them the income they use to pay for their work. This is why people now speak of many websites dying out. That is a separate topic, which this article does not cover further.
Search queries reveal a lot about a person
When you search, you reveal what is on your mind: illnesses, money worries, travel plans, political questions. Google can link search queries to your Google account, to YouTube and to its other services, and uses this data for advertising. On top of that comes US law. Under the CLOUD Act of 2018, US authorities can demand data from American companies, even if that data is stored in Europe.
Qwant states that it does not set tracking cookies, does not create personal profiles and does not store search queries. Individual users cannot verify this. As a French company, however, Qwant is primarily subject to European law.
Why every search query counts
A search engine only gets better when people use it. Every query shows which results fit and which do not. Every query also brings in advertising revenue that is used to expand the index further.
Google built up this lead over more than two decades. Anyone who expects Qwant or Ecosia to deliver the same quality before even using them makes sure they never catch up.
You do not have to give up Google entirely. For many everyday searches, Qwant and Ecosia are already perfectly usable today. For very specialised questions, when looking for shops nearby or for very recent events, Google often still finds more. For these cases, Google remains just a click away.
Conclusion
There is no indication that Google intends to switch off its search for Europe. The real question is whether Europe would be prepared if Google or Microsoft changed the terms unilaterally. By shutting down the Bing interfaces, Microsoft has shown that this can happen. On top of that, Google decides what its users get to see. With AI summaries, this is often just a single answer. And with every query, Google learns more about the people who search.
With Qwant, Ecosia and their joint index, there is for the first time a European alternative that is reducing its dependence step by step. Whether it succeeds will be decided not only in Brussels, but also with every single search query. Anyone who tries Qwant or Ecosia in everyday life has already made a start.