Have you used Qwant yet?
Qwant – The search engine that respects your privacy
Based and designed in Europe, Qwant is the first search engine which protects its users freedoms and ensures that the digital ecosystem remains healthy. Our keywords: privacy and neutrality.
I must admit I had never heard of this search engine before I read this article from Wired. The French National Assembly and the French Army Ministry have announced that they’ll stop using Google as their default search engines, and use Qwant instead.
France is ditching Google to reclaim its online independence
“We have to set the example,” said Florian Bachelier, one of MPs chairing the Assembly’s cybersecurity and digital sovereignty task-force, which was launched in April 2018 to help protect French companies and state agencies from cyberattacks and from the growing dependency on foreign companies. “Security and digital sovereignty are at stake here, which is anything but an issue only for geeks,” Bachelier added. […]In France, this all started with the Edward Snowden. In 2013, when the American whistleblower revealed that the NSA was spying on foreign leaders and had important capability to access data stocked on private companies’ clouds, it was a wake up call for French politicians. A senate report that same year fretted that France and the European Union were becoming “digital colonies”, a term that since then has been used by French government officials and analysts to alert about the threat posed by the US and China, on issues of economic, political and technological sovereignty. Recent scandals, including the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook imbroglio, further shook French politicians and public opinion.
A European Duckduckgo, but without the stupid name? Might be something to look further into.
Miscellaneous Details 