Search engine initiative aims to build EU search

The German-French joint venture European Search Perspective (EUSP) has sent open letters to the heads of government of all 27 EU member states. It proposes building national search indexes as public digital infrastructure. The initiative comes 100 days after the Digital Sovereignty Summit in Berlin, where European heads of state and government pledged to reduce critical digital dependencies.

The organization argues that search infrastructure should be treated as strategic public infrastructure, comparable in importance to energy grids or telecommunications networks: “Search results determine visibility. Visibility determines market access. Market access determines winners and losers. In digital markets, ranking is not a neutral formality – it is a distribution of opportunities,” writes EUSP. The company estimates the dependence at around 18 trillion euros of European economic output.

However, search is currently controlled almost entirely by non-EU companies. According to EUSP, 99.5 percent of all European search queries are answered by two US companies (Google and Bing, 96 percent) and one Russian provider (Yandex, 3.5 percent) (The c't article “Search engine market overview: Many services, two real centers of power” examines the search engine market in detail).

Dangerous Dependence

According to EUSP, a failure or blocking of the dominant search index infrastructure could render governments unable to act within days and bring economies to a standstill. Such measures are not just a theoretical scenario. US policy has shown this in many cases in recent years, for example through trade tariffs or by cutting off an inconvenient judge at the International Criminal Court from digital life.

European Search Perspective proposes that EU member states protect themselves against such measures with sovereign search infrastructure. It should consist of a national search index hosted under European jurisdiction, a national ranking algorithm, and infrastructure that supports both public search services and the fundamental AI web.

EUSP is a joint venture of the European search services Qwant (France) and Ecosia (Germany) and has been operating its European search index under the name Staan (Search Trusted API Access Network) since August 2025, which is also available to third parties as an API. Currently, Staan is limited to French content.

EUSP's proposal to EU heads of government: The company could expand its initiative to other EU member states. Governments could directly finance the index or alternatively use Ecosia and Qwant as the default search engine in public administration. In total, EUSP CEO Wolfgang Oels estimates the cost of a European search engine at around 50 million euros in response to a query from heise online.

Search: No European success story so far

There have already been several attempts to build European search infrastructure. The research program Quaero, launched by Chirac and Schröder in 2005, and its German counterpart Theseus (2007–2012), together consumed around 400 million euros – and delivered patents and publications, but no marketable web index.

Currently, in addition to EUSP, the EU research project OpenWebSearch.eu also pursues the goal of European search sovereignty: 14 research institutions, including CERN and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, are building an open web index as public infrastructure with 8.5 million euros in Horizon Europe funding. However, its funding is about to expire.

(jo)