New EU-created Search Index

The joint venture European Search Perspective (EUSP), founded by Ecosia and Qwant, has launched its own web index for Germany. In addition to the index, the two search providers have developed their own ranking, i.e. algorithms that sort search results by relevance. After France, Germany is thus the second market for which EUSP is accessing web content on its own infrastructure.

A web index is the technical foundation of any search engine: a searchable data structure that records which pages exist, what they contain, and how they are linked. Until now, Google and Microsoft with Bing have essentially controlled this infrastructure. Almost all supposedly alternative search services obtain their results wholly or partly from the two US corporations or from Brave, also US-American – including Ecosia and Qwant themselves.

An independent search infrastructure is a key factor for Europe's digital sovereignty, including in relation to AI. This is because many answers produced by a chatbot use the results of a search engine. The consequences of dependence on US providers became apparent in June: on the instructions of the US government, the AI company Anthropic had to suspend access to its most powerful models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for non-US citizens. European companies and authorities were left without the systems from one day to the next.

Qwant and Ecosia want to break free from their dependence on their US suppliers. To this end, they joined forces at the end of 2024 to form EUSP. Since August 2025, the joint index has already been feeding parts of the search results from Ecosia and the French search engine Qwant. Ecosia and Qwant had announced the launch of the European search index in August 2025 at the time as a milestone for more pluralism in the search engine market.

Now the German index is being added. The index contains, similar to the French one, around one billion web pages, Ecosia CEO Wolfgang Oels told heise online. Ecosia will not immediately feed all German results from this index, but will gradually increase the proportion of results from its own index.

Third parties, such as search engines and AI providers, can also access the index via the Staan (Search Trusted API Access Network) interface. In March 2026, EUSP had proposed in open letters to all EU heads of government to build national search indexes as public digital infrastructure and to extend Staan to other member states. There are several customers for the French index, which has been in operation for some time, said Oels.

Tailwind from Brussels

Oels refers to the EU Commission, which has obliged Google under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to share search data with competitors: This is an important basis on which EUSP is building. Whether Europe gains its digital sovereignty depends on the Commission continuing to enforce the DMA consistently.

Under Article 6(11) DMA, Google, as a gatekeeper in the search market, must pass on ranking, query, click, and ad data to third parties on fair terms. Because the Commission considered Google's implementation to date to be insufficient, it opened a clarification procedure in January 2026, in which it prescribes how the corporation must fulfill the obligation.

Google is also under pressure in the USA. A federal court in Washington DC ruled that the company had illegally maintained its search monopoly through exclusive contracts with Apple, Samsung, and Mozilla, and also obliged it to share search data with qualified competitors. Google appealed against this ruling in May 2026.

The new index does not initially change the market situation: Google holds almost 90 percent of the search engine market in Europe, and around 95 percent on mobile devices. However, with the German EUSP index, there is now for the first time an infrastructure with which search engine providers and AI service providers can search the German and French web independently of US providers.

(jo)