Qwant, long doped with Bing, becomes Europe's anti-Google weapon

Have you thought about changing your search engine? Today, we install it, we forget it, we search on Google by reflex for well over ten years. The European Parliament has just changed it suddenly for thousands of computers. And he made it a political statement.

Since June 4, searches launched in the address bar of Firefox and Microsoft Edge, on the institution's machines, are redirected to Qwant, the French engine founded in 2013.

MEPs can always switch back to Google or another engine, nothing is locked. The timing is no coincidence: on the same day, the Commission presented its “Buy and Use European” package, a series of measures on chips, the cloud and AI. In the background, a significant figure: Google captures around 88% of searches in Europe (StatCounter, January 2026). In other words, Parliament first attacks the most visible symbol of its dependence.

Concretely, the change only concerns the browser address bar: typing a query from Firefox or Edge now launches a Qwant search. Nothing prevents an MEP from opening google.com or resetting Google to default in a few clicks. Parliament has 720 elected officials, plus several thousand assistants and administrative staff: this is the real scale of the measure.

A “sovereign” engine that has long operated in the American style

This is the detail that stings. For years, Qwant has reported its own results by relying largely on Bing, Microsoft's engine. Difficult to make more American.

Bought in 2023 by Octave Klaba (the founder of OVH) after coming close to bankruptcy, the engine joined forces at the end of 2024 with the German Ecosia, within a joint venture called European Search Perspective, to build its own index, called Staan. Commissioned in France in August 2025, it still only processes a portion of French requests, with the joint venture targeting 30 to 50% of French traffic by the end of 2025. In short, the “sovereign” engine is only becoming so, and gradually. Tasty detail: the browsers chosen, Edge and Firefox, also remain American.

For the record, Qwant remains an ultra-minority player: its market share in France is estimated at around 1%, very far behind Google. Parliament's gesture is therefore primarily political, not a commercial threat to Mountain View.

For Qwant, the operation is an opportunity: an institutional showcase and an argument of credibility that money cannot buy. For the European narrative of sovereignty, it is a signal sent to administrations: we can let go, at least a little. But that’s where the problem lies. The change is canceled in two clicks, and it doesn't affect the dependencies that really matter. The continent's cloud remains locked by AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google; the EU produces less than 10% of the world's chips despite the approximately 43 billion euros mobilized by the European Chips Act; and PCs still run under Windows. The search engine is the visible part, and the easiest to move.

Changing a default engine is not nothing: symbols count, and this one says “it’s possible”. But to make it “necessarily the best thing” is to confuse the gesture and the fight. True sovereignty will be played out on the cloud, chips and operating systems, areas that are otherwise less photogenic. In the meantime, a busy MEP can always retype “google.com”. Habit cannot be legislated.