Ecosia
German-based non-profit search engine that donates ad revenue to tree planting and co-founded the European Search Perspective foundation.
Ecosia says the EU's 16 July 2026 order forcing Google to share anonymised search-ranking data from January 2027 could let it answer all its own queries independently, up from roughly two thirds today.
Last refreshed: 26 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Can the EU's new search-data order let Ecosia break Google's grip on search?
Timeline for Ecosia
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European Tech SovereigntyBackground
Ecosia is a German not-for-profit search engine, founded in Berlin in 2009, that funds tree-planting projects with the bulk of its advertising revenue and has financed more than 200 million trees to date.
In November 2024 it founded the European Search Perspective together with France's Qwant, building an independent European search index, Staan, intended to reduce both companies' reliance on Google and Bing for underlying search results. That project, rather than the tree planting, is now the core of Ecosia's strategic bet on European search sovereignty.
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The European Commission's 16 July order requires Google to share anonymised search-ranking data with rival engines on FRAND terms from January 2027, alongside opening 11 Android features to competing AI providers for free .
For Ecosia, which currently answers roughly two thirds of its own search queries and routes the rest through licensed indexes, the ruling is the clearest regulatory support yet for the independent European index it began building with Qwant in November 2024. Ecosia says the mandated access could let it serve all of its queries without leaning on Google's index at all, though the order does not take effect until January 2027 and Google is contesting elements of the underlying specification.