Search is the Google product with the highest bar. Email and file storage are commodity problems that many companies solve well; web search at scale is not, because the hard part is the index — crawling billions of pages and ranking them. Any honest comparison of European search engines has to start there: results quality differs, indexes are smaller, and you will sometimes get a worse answer than Google would have given you.
This post is part of a series on moving off American software.
The question is not whether a European engine is identical to Google. It is whether it is good enough for your searches while treating you better. Here are five options.
The engines
Qwant is a French search engine that says it neither stores users' search history nor sells their personal data. Its results come partly from Staan, the European search index Qwant develops together with Ecosia through their joint venture European Search Perspective, and partly from Microsoft Bing. Qwant also offers Qwant Junior, a separate search engine for children. That last detail is easy to overlook: a filtered, kid-safe entry point is something Google no longer really offers.
Ecosia is a German search engine focused on climate protection. The company is steward-owned and says it puts all of its profits, which come mainly from search advertising, into climate projects such as tree planting and renewable energy. Its results come from Staan as well as from Microsoft Bing and Google. So if your main motive is where your search money goes rather than pure privacy, this is the one with the clearest answer.
Mojeek is the purist option: a privacy-focused engine with its own web crawler, search index and ranking algorithm. According to its privacy policy it does not track users, so searches are not linked to individuals, and it runs its own servers in a UK data centre that uses renewable energy. Because the index is genuinely its own, results can differ noticeably from Google-backed engines — occasionally worse for obscure queries, occasionally refreshingly free of the same top-ten list everyone else shows.
GOOD is a non-profit search engine from Germany whose web results come from the independent search index of Brave. Since November 2024 the search has been ad-free and financed by subscriptions. All shares are held by the charitable foundation GOOD Impact, and the company is B Corp certified. It was called gexsi until a rebranding in 2022.
Metager is a German metasearch engine that combines results from other providers. It is run by a non-profit association, its source code is open, and its servers run on green electricity. Metager also advertises high privacy.
Be honest about the trade-off
There is no European Google-scale index yet, and the structure of this list shows it. Qwant and Ecosia are building Staan together, but both still supplement it with Bing — and Ecosia with Google. Mojeek crawls independently, which buys real independence at the cost of a smaller index. GOOD leans on Brave's index; Metager sidesteps the problem by combining others' results.
What that means in practice: for everyday searches, shopping comparisons and local queries, you may notice the difference. For most research and navigation, you will not. The engines also differ in what they optimize for — Mojeek and Metager for privacy and independence, Ecosia for where the money goes, Qwant for family use with Qwant Junior.
A practical way to switch
You lose nothing by trying. Set one of these as your default for a week and keep a second engine bookmarked for stubborn queries. If a search comes back empty, retry elsewhere instead of concluding the experiment failed. Most people's search habits are a handful of repeated patterns, and those transfer quickly. The realistic outcome is not a perfect Google clone — it is a search engine that is good enough most of the time, does not track you, and whose incentives you can live with.
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