Google’s Scandals Brings New Opportunity To European Privacy Search Engines

Along with several big tech companies across the world, Google has faced a lot of privacy issues; as a result, some less famous companies with their own search engines will have the chance to grow stronger.

While the US search giant is losing users’ heart, a string of search engines, especially in Europe, have gained much more attention than they did due to their respect for user privacy.

Some of those are Mojeek from Britain, Unbubble from Germany, and Qwant from France. They all promise not to track the data of users or offer “behavioral” ads, which Google has done to its users.

When we are witnessing the countless release of the new privacy regulations in Europe, these sites are continually developing. Data scandals of tech giants and comments from their executives are also two other factors that have the significant influence on the residents’ awareness regarding the illegal exploitation of personal information by the tech giants they always trust.

Realizing that Google has restricted the scale of internet searches, Mojeek and other companies have had strategic plans to build up their own safe search engines. Some may ask why Europe is much concerned about user privacy, the answer is relating to the history of this continent. Each individual living in Europe must remember the Nazi-era Gestapo with horrifying spies and the Soviet Union’s secret services.

The Paris-based Qwant’s chairman, Eric Leandri stated that all the citizens must “have the right to privacy.” Also as consumers, internet users in the Atlantic are assigned their rights to the technology companies via the terms in their agreements with the corresponding company.

To evaluate the real situation of the internet traffic, it’s not difficult to see that the demand for exploitation and use of internet has been rising. Notably, in 2017, France’s Qwant solved about 10 billion queries, 3 times as much as those in 2016. The numbers keep growing to 20% in 2018 with 80 million visits. At present, Qwant occupies 6% of the French market share for search engines.

Another exciting news is that, instead of Google, Qwant has been selected as a default search engine for the French Parliament and army since one month ago. This engine doesn’t only commit users not to track cookies or their profile, but it also owns 20 billion pages written by many languages, like French, Italian, and German. Results on Qwant are now drawn from Bing of Microsoft.

The same things also happen to Britain’s Mojeek. This search engine now has about 2 billion web pages and 200,000 visits per month. As per Unbubble from Germany, the engine is famous for keeping locations of its users secret and no filtration of users’ results.

Although these tech companies are growing, Google’s position is still unbeaten with up to three-quarters of the market share all over the world.