The European search engine market is strongly dominated by Google, with a stable market share of over 90 percent. Google's quasi-monopoly position, as well as its information distortions and business practices, have been under scrutiny all along.
ITA researcher Astrid Mager has devoted the past decade of her research to examining the omnipotence of search engines and the influence of Big Tech on Europe. In her newly published dossier "European Search", she explains why digital independence is not so easy to achieve and what the EU can nevertheless do to ensure autonomy over our data, at least to a limited extent.
Throughout her prestigious Elise-Richter project, she has examined European search engine initiatives in detail: the privacy-friendly search engine Startpage, the peer-to-peer search engine YaCy and the Open Web Index Initiative, which calls for the creation of a publicly or EU-funded web index to enable independent search engines in the first place.
Download the dossier here: "European Search" - ITA Dossier No.70