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.
So many people are happy here. I can understand why but quick reminder that Qwant is not privacy friendly like they claim to be and that the CEO is a bastard who threatened employees.
As for Ecosia, the only green they have is their name. Great they plant trees but they pushed AI so it’s basically like if they are destroying the trees they planted.
There is a search engine with their own index from UK, privacy-friendly, it is called Mojeek. It is not as good as the others but I’ve been using it for maybe 4 months and it already improved a lot. They need users to give feedback and improve. Give it a try ! 😊
I don’t know how far in the rabbithole I am, but at this point I feel like it’s nearly impossible to find a company that doesn’t have dirt on it in one way or another. There are alternatives in some domains, but for search engines, it’s really narrowed down to Brave (which also have some not very nice people in it) and Duck duck go, which uses Bing. Which is basically pointless to me, not even talking about using UE products, for me, the best way to get some fresh air is to have companies that have their own search engines (so, not Bing or Google, this is why I don’t use alternatives like Starpage or Searx) There’s Mojeek, yes, but last time I used it, it was…really bad. I still encourage them tho! I’ll give it another shot now.