Google Search alternatives from Europe: Ecosia, Qwant, MetaGer and Mojeek compared

Most European search engines don't have a full index of the web. Ecosia, Qwant and MetaGer get some or all of their results from American companies, or from a new European index that is still being built. Mojeek, in the UK, is the exception: everything it shows comes from its own crawler. If you want your searches handled by a company based in Europe, that may not matter to you. If you want them out of American hands, it decides the answer.

Below, each one gets the three answers from Is it really European?, plus whose index it uses and what it costs. Google is in the last column for reference. We compared how these engines are built and run; we did not test the quality of their results.

At a glance

	Ecosia	Qwant	MetaGer	Mojeek	Google
Owned	Germany	France	Germany	United Kingdom (Europe, not EU)	United States
Headquartered	Germany	France	Germany	United Kingdom (Europe, not EU)	United States
Hosted	Mixed: servers not named, behind Cloudflare; searches go to Microsoft, Google or Staan	Mixed: France, on OVHcloud; searches can go to Microsoft	Mixed: Germany, on Hetzner; searches go to the sources below	United Kingdom, in a data centre it doesn't name	Worldwide, on Google's own servers
Whose index	Bing, Google and Staan	Its own, Staan and Bing	Mojeek, Brave, Google and Staan	Its own	Its own
Cost	Free, with ads	Free, with ads	Paid: €5 for about 500 searches	Free, with ads	Free, with ads
Ads from	Microsoft, Google	Microsoft, adMarketplace, Affilizz	No ads	adMarketplace and its own	Google

Prices and terms as published on 8 November 2026.

Whose index it is

An index is the database of web pages a search engine looks through. Building one is very expensive, so most smaller engines rent someone else's.

Ecosia shows results from Microsoft Bing, Google or Staan. Which one you get depends on your country, your device, the query and what you accept in the cookie banner (Ecosia). It publishes no overall split. Its Bing results reach it through a commercial deal with System1, the American company that owns Startpage (Ecosia).

Qwant has its own crawler and index, and fills the rest with Staan and Microsoft Bing (ranking page, 2025 transparency report, in French). It doesn't say how much comes from each. France's competition authority notes that Qwant has partly used Microsoft's technology since 2016.

MetaGer is a metasearch engine: apart from a few small indexes of its own, it asks others. Its web sources are Mojeek, Brave, Staan and Google, which it reaches through a reseller called Serper (MetaGer). MetaGer warns that this list isn't constantly updated.

Mojeek crawls the web itself and has passed nine billion pages. Its web results come entirely from that index, ranked by its own algorithms (Mojeek).

Staan is the European index behind much of this. Ecosia and Qwant build it through a joint venture in Paris (EUSP), it runs on OVHcloud in Europe, and it covers French, German and English only (Staan). Ecosia says most of its traffic in France now comes from Staan, that results went live in Germany on 30 July, and that it expects to answer most German searches from it by the end of the year (Ecosia). One of its help pages still says France only.

Staan isn't all European either. Its FAQ describes an American backup that fills in certain results when needed, and says customers can ask to have it switched off, at some cost to quality. It doesn't name the provider, or say whether searches on Ecosia or Qwant use it.

Owned: who controls them

Ecosia: Germany. Ecosia GmbH in Berlin is steward-owned: the votes sit with its founder Christian Kroll and co-owner Tim Schumacher, who can't sell their shares for profit (Ecosia). The Swiss Purpose Foundation holds most of the capital but only 1% of the votes, which comes with a veto over changes to Ecosia's purpose (taz, in German).

Qwant: France. Qwant SAS belongs entirely to the holding company Synfonium. The Klaba brothers, who founded OVHcloud, hold 75% of Synfonium, and the French public bank Caisse des Dépôts holds the other 25% (Caisse des Dépôts, Le Monde Informatique, both in French).

MetaGer: Germany. It is run by SUMA-EV, a charitable association in Hannover (MetaGer).

Mojeek: United Kingdom (Europe, not EU). Mojeek Limited is registered in England, and Marc Smith holds more than half of the votes (Companies House).

Google: United States. Larry Page and Sergey Brin together held 52.7% of the votes in Alphabet in April 2026 (proxy statement). For people in the EU, the company responsible for your data is Google Ireland Limited, but Google LLC, in the US, is responsible for what is indexed and shown in Search (Google).

Where your searches go

Ecosia sends your IP address and search terms to Bing or Google with each search that uses them (Ecosia). Ecosia anonymises the address within 7 days, Microsoft after 6 months and Google after 9 (Ecosia). It says its servers are around the world and doesn't name who runs them. Its site sits behind Cloudflare, an American company, as a DNS lookup on 8 November confirmed. Ads come from Microsoft and Google.

Qwant says it is hosted in France, and a DNS lookup on 8 November put its search servers at OVHcloud there. It keeps no search history and doesn't personalise results. When Microsoft supplies results, Qwant sends it your keywords, browser details, the first three bytes of your IP address and your rough location, and it may send the full address for security and fraud checks (Qwant).

MetaGer runs on servers rented from Hetzner in Germany. It doesn't save or pass on your IP address, your search terms go to its sources, and the results are kept for a few hours (MetaGer). It has no ads.

Mojeek doesn't record IP addresses and deletes its logs after 90 days. When adMarketplace supplies an ad, it gets your search terms and a two-letter country code from Mojeek's servers, not from your browser (Mojeek).

Google says it has servers around the world and that your data may be processed outside your country (Google).

What it costs

Ecosia, Qwant and Mojeek are free and funded by ads. Ecosia gives all its profits to climate action. Qwant's ads can't be switched off.

MetaGer has had no free search since September 2024, when Yahoo ended its contracts and its ads went with them. You buy tokens, one per ordinary web search: 500 for €5, taxes included, which MetaGer says lasts about two months, and most of the money goes on to the search services it asks (prices).

AI answers

Ecosia and Qwant both add AI answers by default, and both let you turn them off.

Ecosia's AI Overviews use Staan and Mistral's Small 3.2 model (Ecosia). Its chief executive said in October that it is leaving Mistral for other open models (heise), but that help page, updated on 4 November, still names Mistral.

Qwant's Flash Answer uses models from Mistral and OpenAI (Qwant). Its AI chat goes to OpenAI through OpenRouter, both American, with no data kept (Qwant, in French).

Making one your default

On an iPhone or a Mac, Safari lists Ecosia. Qwant isn't in Safari's list and offers a Mac extension instead, and MetaGer points Safari users to Firefox. In Chrome and Firefox you can add any of them in the settings or with the engine's own extension.

Also European, but not in the table

• Seznam, the Czech portal, runs its own crawler.
• Swisscows is Swiss, with servers in Switzerland, but it credits Brave for its results, and we couldn't find who controls it.
• GMX and WEB.DE are German portals whose search results come from Google and Yahoo.

Startpage comes up in the same lists. It is a Dutch company, but its owner is System1, listed in New York with no controlling shareholder, and its results come from Google and Bing. DuckDuckGo, Brave and Kagi are American.

Which one fits

It comes down to which part of "European" you care about.

• Leaving Google with the least effort: Ecosia. It's free and Safari lists it, but expect Bing or Google behind many of your results.
• The most European setup that is free: Qwant, with French owners and servers and an index partly its own. Some results and ads still come from Microsoft.
• No ads, and you'll pay for that: MetaGer, at about €5 for two months, knowing that part of its results come from American companies.
• An index of its own: Mojeek, with the "Europe, not EU" label.