Best European Alternatives to Bing
Looking for a European alternative to Bing? Microsoft's Bing search engine tracks your searches and collects data to build advertising profiles. For users who value privacy and want to support European digital sovereignty, there are excellent alternatives.
We've curated the best privacy-focused search engines from Europe. These alternatives provide quality search results while respecting your privacy and keeping your data protected under European law.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
Why Choose a European Alternative to Bing?
No Tracking
Your searches stay private. No profiles built, no personalized ads.
GDPR Protection
Your data stays in Europe, protected by the world's strongest privacy laws.
Neutral Results
Unbiased search results without filter bubbles or personalization.
Eco-Friendly Options
Some alternatives use ad revenue to plant trees or support sustainability.
Best European Alternatives to Bing
We've curated the best privacy-focused search engines from European companies. Each alternative has been evaluated for privacy, search quality, and user experience.
Ecosia
The search engine that plants trees with its ad revenue
Qwant
French privacy-first search engine with its own indexing technology
Mojeek
Independent search engine with its own crawler and index
Swisscows
Family-friendly Swiss search engine with semantic search technology
Startpage
Google results without the tracking - the world's most private search engine
Feature Comparison: Bing vs European Alternatives
| Feature | Bing | Ecosia | Qwant | Startpage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | USA | Germany | France | Netherlands |
| Tracks Users | Yes | No | No | No |
| GDPR Compliant | Partial | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| EU Data Centers | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Own Index | Yes | No (Bing) | Yes | No (Google) |
| Browser Extension | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile Apps | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Key takeaways
- Microsoft archived the Bing Search API documentation on 11 August 2025 and now sells only Grounding with Bing Search at $14 per 1,000 transactions.
- Microsoft's own agent documentation states that data sent to Grounding with Bing leaves the Azure compliance boundary and is not covered by the same terms, including location of processing.
- The EU Data Boundary applies to Microsoft's enterprise services — Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform — and consumer Bing is not among them.
- Bing is not a designated core platform service under the DMA; Microsoft's designated services are LinkedIn and Windows PC OS, so no choice-screen obligation reaches it.
- Leaving Bing for Ecosia used to mean keeping Bing's results. Since EUSP went live in Germany on 30 July 2026 that is no longer what happens.
Why people leave Bing
Most people in Europe do not choose Bing. They arrive at it, through the search box in Windows, through Edge on a work laptop, or through some other product that quietly buys its results. That is the first thing worth understanding about leaving it: for a lot of readers this is not a habit to break but a default to find and change.
The second is that Microsoft has been walking away from the wholesale business that made Bing matter. The Bing Search API documentation now sits in Microsoft's previous-versions archive, marked retired, dated 11 August 2025. What Microsoft sells in its place, at microsoft.com/bing/apis, is Grounding with Bing Search at $14 per 1,000 transactions — a component for Azure agents, not a search service anyone builds a search box on.
And there is no regulatory relief coming. Under the Digital Markets Act, Microsoft has two designated core platform services: LinkedIn and Windows PC OS. Bing is not one of them. Whatever the DMA does to defaults elsewhere, it does not reach this product, so anything you want changed about Bing you have to change yourself.
- Microsoft's European commitment does not cover it The EU Data Boundary is a real commitment and a narrow one: Microsoft describes it as applying to its enterprise online services, naming Azure, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Microsoft 365. Consumer Bing search is not on that list. Buyers who assume the boundary covers everything with a Microsoft logo on it are assuming something Microsoft has not said, and the documentation is the place to check rather than the sales deck.
- Microsoft says so itself, in the agent documentation The Foundry documentation for Grounding with Bing Search warns developers that customer data is transferred outside the Azure compliance boundary to the Grounding service, and that the service is not subject to the same data processing terms — including, in Microsoft's own parenthesis, location of processing — and does not carry the same compliance standards and certifications. That is Microsoft drawing a line around Bing from the inside. It is the clearest single sentence on this page and it is not written by us.
- The wholesale supply closed For a decade, anyone who wanted a search index without building one bought Bing's. That route is gone: the API documentation is archived and the product page now offers only the Azure grounding components. For European engines this was existential rather than annoying, and it explains why Ecosia and Qwant put money into building an index together rather than negotiating a better price for someone else's.
- No choice screen is coming Google Search and Chrome are designated under the DMA and have had to change defaults in Europe because of it. Bing has not been designated, so the obligations that produced those changes do not apply here. If Bing is your default because Windows or Edge put it there, the only thing that will move it is you opening settings. Waiting for a regulator to do it is waiting for something that has already been decided against.
What you have to replace, not just match
Work out where Bing is actually reaching you, because the box in the browser is usually not the main one.
There is the browser default, which is a two-minute change. There is Windows search, which sends web results to Bing from the taskbar and is a separate setting. And on a managed work machine there is whatever your IT department has pinned, which you may be able to change for yourself and may not.
Then there is the indirect layer: products that buy search results wholesale and never tell you whose. That layer is the reason this page ranks Ecosia first and Mojeek third — both are moving in the opposite direction from Microsoft, one by building an index with a partner and the other by having crawled its own from scratch since 2011.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Ecosia | Berlin, Germany | Free | EU (Germany) |
| #2 | Qwant | Paris, France | Free | EU (France) |
| #3 | Mojeek | Brighton, United Kingdom | Free | United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #4 | Swisscows | Egnach, Switzerland | Free | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #5 | Startpage | The Hague, Netherlands | Free | EU (Netherlands) |
How each alternative compares to Bing
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Bing is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (EU).
- Source code. Closed source, as Bing is.
- Independently checked. B Corp certified.
Best for: Bing users who want the switch to change what is underneath, not only the logo
For years the criticism of Ecosia on a page like this one wrote itself: swapping Bing for a German front end to Bing is decoration. That criticism has an expiry date now. EUSP, the index Ecosia owns jointly with Qwant, answers the majority of French queries and began serving German ones on 30 July 2026, with most German traffic expected to move across by the end of the year.
The reason it belongs first here rather than anywhere else is the direction of travel. Microsoft spent the past year withdrawing from selling search results; Ecosia spent it building an index with a partner so it would not have to buy them. Whatever you think of tree planting, that is a structural answer to a structural problem, and it is the opposite of what the incumbent on this page did.
Around it sit the things Ecosia has been unusually willing to publish: its financial reports and tree-planting receipts, and on 2 March 2026 the full text of its media licensing agreement, which pays publishers on a formula it printed rather than one it negotiated quietly. The limits are equally plain. The index is newest in the markets it has just reached, there is no personalisation, and the company is a fraction of Microsoft's size.
What Ecosia does better than Bing
- Results increasingly come from EUSP, an index Ecosia co-owns, rather than from the product you are leaving
- German company under EU jurisdiction, inside the single market rather than adjacent to it
- No advertising profile built from your queries, and no account required to avoid one
- Publishes its financial reports, its tree-planting receipts and the terms on which it pays publishers
- AI features can be turned off entirely in settings, or left on and run on a European model provider
Where Ecosia is a step down from Bing
- Index coverage varies by country while the European rollout continues
- Smaller engineering operation than Microsoft, with a correspondingly slower feature pace
- No personalisation, so local queries need the place name spelled out
- Closed source, so the privacy claims rest on the company rather than inspection
Standout against Bing. It is the only entry here that responded to the wholesale search market closing by buying a share of an index instead of a subscription to one.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Bing is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. European Union.
- Source code. Closed source, as Bing is.
Best for: French and Belgian organisations that need the supplier inside the EU
Qwant owns the other half of EUSP, which makes it the second party to the only serious attempt at a European web index, and it brings something Ecosia does not: a French legal entity that a public body can contract with directly. For a school, a municipality or a ministry moving off a Microsoft default, that is usually the deciding detail rather than a bonus.
It has also built an answer layer of its own rather than living entirely on somebody else's results: short generated answers inside the results and a Summary that condenses a page in one click, free and unlimited once you make an account. Qwant Junior handles the classroom case with an age-appropriate mode, which is why it turns up on school machines across France.
Two honest limits before you commit. Result quality is below what a Bing user is used to on technical and long-tail queries, and Qwant has added its own generated answers and page summaries, free and unlimited with an account, where its own materials note that the advanced optional features involve sharing certain data with partners. Read that before you decide it is the maximal-privacy option; it is the maximal-jurisdiction one.
What Qwant does better than Bing
- A French supplier with EU processing, which a public-sector buyer can sign without a legal memo
- Co-owner of EUSP, so the index behind it is being built in Europe rather than licensed from Redmond
- Qwant Junior gives classrooms an age-appropriate mode with no equivalent on the incumbent
- Short generated answers and a one-click page Summary, free and unlimited with a Qwant account
- The data sharing behind the optional advanced features is explained at sign-up and can be refused
Where Qwant is a step down from Bing
- Weaker than Bing on technical queries and the long tail
- The optional AI features involve sharing some data with partners, per Qwant's own description
- Closed source, so the claims have to be taken on trust
- Corporate history has attracted scrutiny worth reading before a large deployment
Standout against Bing. It is the entry a French institution can adopt on jurisdiction alone, before anyone has looked at the results page.
- Which law reaches it. United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). Bing is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. United Kingdom.
- Source code. Closed source, as Bing is.
- Independently checked. Own independent index.
Best for: Anyone who has just learned what happens when a rented index is switched off
Mojeek is the argument of this page in product form. Microsoft has spent a year retreating from supplying search results to other people; Mojeek has spent fifteen years crawling its own, from a rebuild started in 2011 to nine billion pages in 2025, run by a small company registered in England and working out of the Sussex Innovation Centre. When the wholesale market narrows, the people who own an index are the ones with options.
For a reader that means results genuinely unrelated to the ones you are leaving. Mojeek ranks independently, so it disagrees with Bing rather than reproducing it with the tracking filed off, and that disagreement is the point for research, for checking coverage, and for anyone who thinks the shape of the web should not be decided in two American companies.
The honest costs: nine billion pages is a fraction of what the big indexes hold, so obscure queries come back thin and you will feel it within a week. Mojeek is in the United Kingdom, outside the EEA under an adequacy decision, which is a deliberate decision for an EU organisation rather than a footnote. And it is closed source, independence notwithstanding.
What Mojeek does better than Bing
- Its own crawler, index and ranking, so nothing you see was produced by the incumbent first
- Sells access to that index as a web search API and a site search API, which is the supply Microsoft withdrew
- No tracking, no account and no personalisation anywhere in the product
- An independent company since 2004, with an index rebuilt from scratch in 2011 that has grown to nine billion pages rather than plateaued
- Surfaces pages that a Bing-derived ranking had already decided against
Where Mojeek is a step down from Bing
- Recall is well below Bing's, obviously so on obscure and long-tail queries
- UK jurisdiction, which is adequacy rather than EU establishment
- No maps, shopping or the answer panels a Bing user may be used to
- Closed source, so the independence is documented rather than inspectable
Standout against Bing. It is the only entry here that sells what Microsoft stopped selling: raw results from an index its owner actually controls.
- Which law reaches it. Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). Bing is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Switzerland (Swiss Alps bunker).
- Source code. Closed source, as Bing is.
Best for: Family computers, classrooms and library terminals running on Windows defaults
A large share of the machines where Bing is the default are shared ones: a school laptop, a library terminal, the family PC in the corner. Swisscows is built for exactly that situation, and its filtering is the reason. Adult material is unavailable rather than deprioritised, and there is no setting a determined teenager can find, which is a different guarantee from a safe-search preference that can be switched off by whoever is sitting there.
It is Swiss, storing data in Switzerland under an adequacy decision, and the company has built a small suite around the search box: a VPN, an email service, encrypted messaging and cloud storage. For a household trying to reduce the number of American defaults in one go rather than one product at a time, that suite is more useful than another set of ten blue links.
The limits are the same ones that make it good. Filtering is not adjustable, so an adult researching medicine, law or anything adjacent to a blocked term will hit walls that Bing would not put there. Result quality sits below the big indexes, and it is closed source. Pick it for shared machines, not for your own research laptop.
What Swisscows does better than Bing
- Filtering is on by default and cannot be disabled, where a safe-search setting can be turned off at the keyboard
- Semantic search handles the imprecise questions children actually type
- Swiss hosting under an adequacy decision, outside the reach of a US disclosure order
- A VPN, mail, messaging and storage alongside the search box, from the same supplier
- No tracking and no advertising profile built from what the household searches for
Where Swisscows is a step down from Bing
- The filter cannot be adjusted, which gets in the way of legitimate adult queries
- Result quality is below the index you are leaving
- Swiss adequacy rather than processing inside the single market, which some EU buyers require
- Closed source, and a smaller operation than anything else on this page
Standout against Bing. It is the only entry here where the safety behaviour is the product rather than a preference, which is what a shared machine actually needs.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Netherlands). Bing is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Netherlands (EU).
- Source code. Closed source, as Bing is.
- Independently checked. No IP logging.
Best for: People leaving Bing for quality reasons who accept where the quality comes from
Startpage is last on this page and it is not last because it is bad. It is last because of what it does: it forwards your query to Google with the identifying details stripped and returns Google's ranking. For a Bing user that is a straightforward upgrade in recall, and the search engine never receives anything it can attach to you.
If your reason for leaving Bing is that Microsoft builds an advertising profile from what you search for, this closes that completely and costs you nothing in result quality. Startpage BV operates from The Hague under EU jurisdiction and does not log IP addresses, and Anonymous View will open a result through a proxy so the destination site does not get you either.
What it does not do is the thing this page is mostly about. You have moved from one American index to the other, and the directory records a US parent company behind the Dutch operating company. Everything above it on this page is ranked higher because it changes the supplier as well as the surveillance, and that ordering is deliberate.
What Startpage does better than Bing
- Better recall than the index you are leaving, because the ranking is Google's
- No profile, no IP logging and no account anywhere in the product
- Dutch operating company under EU jurisdiction
- Anonymous View hides you from the destination site, not only from the search engine
- Nothing to relearn, so the switch tends to stick
Where Startpage is a step down from Bing
- The results come from the other large American index, which is the opposite of what most readers of this page want
- The directory records a US parent company behind the Dutch entity
- Dependent on continued access to an upstream that can be withdrawn, which this page is largely a lesson in
- No maps, shopping or generated summaries of its own
Standout against Bing. It is the only entry that improves your results on day one, and the only one that does so by moving you to the index this page spends its time arguing against.
What actually breaks when you switch
Bing usually has more than one way into your day, so a partial switch feels like a failed one. The browser default, the Windows taskbar search and the phone are three separate settings, and changing the first while leaving the other two is why people say the alternatives did not stick.
On a work laptop the decision may not be yours. Managed Edge profiles and group policy can pin the engine, and the fix is a conversation with IT rather than a settings page. It helps to bring the documentation: Microsoft's own EU Data Boundary pages list the services it covers, and consumer search is not among them.
The third thing is expectation management on result quality. Coming from Bing rather than Google, the drop to an independent index is smaller than the internet claims, but it is real on obscure queries. Give it a fortnight, keep a second engine for the awkward ones, and judge on week three rather than day one.
Am I even using Bing on purpose?
Often not, and it is worth five minutes to find out where it is set. Windows sends web results from the taskbar search to Bing, Edge defaults to it, and a work profile may have it enforced by policy. People who switch their browser engine and still see Bing results have usually changed one of three places.
The indirect uses are harder to see. Plenty of apps and assistants have bought search results wholesale without naming the supplier, which is exactly the arrangement Microsoft has spent the past year withdrawing from.
The practical version: change the browser default, change the Windows search setting, and then check on the phone, where the default usually came from whoever made the handset.
Is a Microsoft search safer for a European company than a Google one?
Not for the reason most procurement teams assume. Microsoft's European commitments are attached to the enterprise services it names — Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform — and consumer search is outside that perimeter. The company is incorporated in Redmond either way.
Microsoft is unusually explicit about this in the documentation for its Bing grounding tool, which tells developers that the data leaves the Azure compliance boundary and that the processing terms, location of processing included, are not the same ones.
So if the reasoning behind choosing Bing is that your organisation already has a Microsoft agreement, check whether that agreement covers this product. In the case of consumer search, the published documentation says it does not.
If Ecosia used to run on Bing, what has actually changed?
The index underneath it. Ecosia and Qwant jointly own EUSP, and its results already answer the majority of Ecosia's French traffic, with the German rollout beginning on 30 July 2026 and the majority of German queries expected by the end of the year.
That matters here more than on any other page on this site, because the old objection to Ecosia was specifically that a Bing refugee was still drinking from Bing. In France and Germany that objection has an expiry date on it.
It is also why the honest recommendation depends on where you search from. In markets EUSP has not reached, the sourcing question is still open and worth asking again in a year.
I build software and I used the Bing Search API. What now?
The documentation is archived and the product page offers Grounding with Bing Search and Grounding with Bing Custom Search, both at $14 per 1,000 transactions, capped at 150 transactions per second and a million a day. They are designed to feed a model inside Azure AI Foundry, and the raw results are not returned to you, so they are not a drop-in replacement for a search endpoint.
Mojeek sells access to its own index through a web search API and a site search API, which is the closest thing on this page to what you used to buy, with an index of nine billion pages rather than Microsoft's scale.
The structural lesson is worth more than the replacement: an index you rent can be withdrawn, and in August 2025 one was. Anyone building a product on wholesale search should now be asking what happens when the supplier changes its mind, because there is a recent example.
Which one to pick
If you want the switch to mean something structural, Ecosia is the answer, because it is the one that responded to the wholesale market closing by co-owning an index rather than renting one, and in France and Germany you are already reading the results of that decision.
If you are buying rather than browsing — a school, a municipality, a public body — Qwant is the one with the French entity and the children's mode, and it owns the other half of the same index.
If your reaction to reading this page is that a rented index is a liability, Mojeek is the entry built by people who reached that conclusion in 2004. For a shared family or classroom machine, Swisscows is the honest recommendation over everything above it.
And if all you actually wanted was better results, Startpage gives you them today, from Google. That is a legitimate choice and it is worth making with your eyes open rather than by accident, which is how most people ended up on Bing in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ecosia if you want the shortest honest step away, since it now serves results from an index it co-owns rather than from Bing. Qwant if you want a French supplier and a children's mode. Mojeek if you want results that were never derived from Bing or Google. Swisscows if the machine is used by a family or a classroom. Startpage if the only thing you want back is the result quality, accepting that it comes from Google.
The documentation for the Bing Search APIs now sits in Microsoft's previous-versions archive marked as retired, dated 11 August 2025, and microsoft.com/bing/apis currently offers only Grounding with Bing Search and Grounding with Bing Custom Search at $14 per 1,000 transactions. Those are components for Azure AI Foundry agents rather than a general search endpoint, and the raw results are not returned to the developer.
Microsoft describes the EU Data Boundary as a commitment for its enterprise online services and names Azure, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Microsoft 365. Consumer Bing search is not in that list. Microsoft's documentation for Grounding with Bing goes further, telling developers that data sent to it leaves the Azure compliance boundary and is not subject to the same data processing terms, including location of processing.
No. Microsoft has two designated core platform services under the DMA: LinkedIn and Windows PC OS. Bing is not designated, so the obligations that produced browser and search choice screens for other gatekeeper services do not apply to it. Anything you want changed about how Bing reaches you has to be changed in your own settings.
Decreasingly. Ecosia and Qwant jointly own EUSP, a European search index that already answers the majority of Ecosia's French queries and started serving German ones on 30 July 2026, with most German traffic expected to follow by the end of 2026. In markets the rollout has not reached, the sourcing question is still worth asking, and it is worth re-testing in a year rather than deciding once.
That is a separate setting from your browser's default engine, which is why people change the browser and keep seeing Bing results. Change the browser default, then the Windows search behaviour, then check the phone, where the default usually came from the handset maker rather than from you. On a managed work machine the setting may be enforced by policy, in which case the change has to come from IT.
Startpage, because it returns Google's rankings rather than a smaller index, and that is a straightforward upgrade in recall from Bing. The catch is directional: you have left one American index for the other, and the directory records that Startpage BV sits under a US parent. If quality is genuinely the only criterion, that trade is worth naming out loud before you make it.
It finds out how rented they were. Microsoft archived the Bing Search API documentation in August 2025 and replaced it with a grounding component that does not hand back raw results, which broke the pattern a lot of small products were built on. Mojeek sells access to its own index through a search API, and Ecosia and Qwant chose to build EUSP rather than keep buying, which is the same lesson expressed as a business plan.
For jurisdiction, both sit outside the reach of a US disclosure order, so either works. Swisscows is Swiss and stores data there under an adequacy decision, with its own VPN, mail and messaging products alongside the search box. An EU institution that needs processing inside the single market rather than adequacy alongside it will prefer Qwant or Ecosia, and that is a procurement distinction rather than a privacy one.
Who worked on this review
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