Europe’s goal of independence from U.S. tech could face a new layer: search engines. According to recent data, when Europeans open a browser and search for information, almost nine out of ten type their query into American Google. Afterwards, there is Microsoft’s Bing, also US-based, which accounts for barely 5 per cent of queries. On the other side, the smaller players, including European home‑grown Ecosia, struggle to get a piece of the remaining share of the market.
This means that the EU has a sovereignty battle over how its users search online. Having a publicly funded, open-source search infrastructure could be another independent step to give the continent digital sovereignty over how information on the web is indexed, accessed, and used by artificial intelligence.
Reclaiming the web for the public
Lying on these principles is the Open Search Foundation (OSF), a European project to create a public ’web index’. “We want to build the machinery room that Google has in its basement, but make it public,” said Stefan Voigt, the leading voice of the Foundation, to EU Perspectives. “The web is meant to be a public thing. We want to relate it back to the public”.
OSF’s goal is to make the raw data of the web, links, texts, images, metadata, available for start-ups, researchers, and AI developers to build their own services, from search engines to analytics tools, without relying on proprietary American indexes.
The web is meant to be a public thing. We want to relate it back to the public. – Stefan Voigt, Open Search Foundation
“The upfront hurdle to collect and process massive amounts of web data is huge,” Mr Voigt explains. “A common web data infrastructure would allow European innovators to build higher-level services faster, in a sovereign manner”. According to him, the project is being discussed with the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which coordinates Europe’s supercomputing network. By aligning open-search infrastructure with the continent’s growing network of AI factories and computing clusters, the Foundation hopes to make Europe’s digital backbone powerful and autonomous.
The initiative also fits into Europe’s broader tech sovereignty goals. In particular, the call for less dependence on critical layers of the digital ecosystem, from chips and clouds to data. In that ’sovereignty stack’, search is the missing layer: the map that connects everything else.
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The costs of dependence
Europe’s smaller search engines know the cost of dependence firsthand. Berlin-based Ecosia and France’s Qwant, for long, relied on Microsoft’s Bing index to power their results. When Microsoft increased its application programming interface (API) prices “by a factor of ten”, Mr Voigt recalls, “they were forced to build something themselves”.
The two companies have since joined forces on the European Search Perspective, a continental web-index project launching in France and Germany. In previous interviews, Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll urged about the dangers of U.S. dependence. He warned that if American companies turned off access to search results tomorrow, Europeans would need to return to books.
Building a financially stable model
Crucially, OSF rejects the advertising-driven model that underpins Silicon Valley. Stefan Voigt outlines a freemium model to keep the open-search infrastructure financially sustainable while remaining accessible to innovators. Basic access would be free for start-ups and researchers, while heavy users, such as commercial operators or data-intensive companies, would contribute modest fees to cover maintenance and scaling costs.
The Open Search Foundation also imagines long-term public funding combined with commercial use, potentially through a public-private partnership. It envisions a system that could include “a system of remuneration through micropayments for those who provide quality information on the web, like journalists or artists, to be paid by those who commercially use or exploit it. Also, some fee for those companies that use the web infrastructure heavily, to support maintaining it”, Mr Voigt explained.
Can search survive in the AI age?
The initiative comes in a crucial time, when AI is reshaping search. Increasingly more users turn to chatbots like ChatGPT for answers or rely on AI summaries, such as Google’s ’AI Overview’.
We need a route back to the original information. Otherwise, we lose our common understanding of the world. – Stefan Voigt, Open Search Foundation
Despite the trend, concerns about accuracy and attribution are growing. Up to the recent Dutch elections, authorities were concerned about OpenAI and Mistral models giving false information to users, and advising voters not to rely on the tools to define their vote. “If every answer is just generated on the fly, depending on who you are or what you pay—that’s the road to hell,” Stefan Voigt warns. “We need a route back to the original information. Otherwise, we lose our common understanding of the world.”
Europe’s race against time
For all its promise, the open-search project faces familiar European hurdles: slow bureaucracy, fragmented funding, and cautious politics. “My biggest concern is that we fail not because we lack smart people or computing power. But because we don’t get it on the ground fast enough,” Voigt admits. “The hyperscalers move quicker. Europe has to move swiftly, boldly—and start doing, not just talking”.
