For the people who have not yet decided on a search engine. The most EU way you can go is Ecosia or Qwant as they are building their own search index.
Ecosia is my personal pick as its also aimed at planting trees and they have quite a good browser alongside it.
Great! Ecosia works super well, and it feels good to not having to rely on google to find things. Only thing I’d wish for is that they’d have some map service or similar to find restaurants and shop. There is sadly no good replacement for google maps that I’ve found
Organic Maps
Try Here WeGo maps, it’s the closest one to Google maps but European
Ecosia works well enough for me too. The tree planting thing should never be forgotten. The scope of their work is impressive and they’re very transparent about their goals and funding. No other search engine comes close to that.
The tree planting sounds so much like greenwashing and an excuse to serve ads
I listened to a podcast a couple years ago. The founder talked about how he made sure that Ecosia can not be sold and monetized, he himself is not making much money from it. My english is not good enough to explain it in more detail. :)
I see greenwashing everywhere, but as far as I can tell from the podcast and their YouTube, this is legit.
200 million trees. Far from greenwashing.
Folks, critical thinking is more important than ever these days. Making conclusions based on a brain fart - when we have the internet at our fingertips - is partly why the world is the way it is.