Not paid, but Ecosia based in Germany and Qwant based in France. Plus they are working together on an EU based index. For now they rely on Americans in majority like Kagi and DuckDuckGo do afaik.
Haven’t used it, so can’t say I endorse it, but this is the answer to your question.
From their website:
After 12 months as a paying customer, you get a copy of the source code.
That’s an interesting arrangement. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it. But I’m not sure what the benefit is supposed to be since they presumably retain exclusive rights to use that code commercially.
retain exclusive rights to use that code commercially.
Which would enable you to run your private instance, if you’d like.
Maybe, but if they’re using paid APIs for access and not scraping like SearXNG, you may not even be able to set up a paid API account on many search engines, so your instance may be heavily limited.
Is it a copy or access to their repo? If you just get a copy once, it does not really enable people to selfhost it.
I am using it. It’s good. No AI bullshit.
Not EU, but swisscows.com is the closest I can think of
They advertise the snakeoil messenger TeleGuard. Apparently it is proprietary, which does not really create trust. They claim they don’t store anything, but without trust… idk
Isn’t Kagi mostly just a meta search engine aggregating results from the usual suspects with some added independent index building?
That’s not exactly a rare feature, in fact most independent search engines do exactly that (querying the big searches while building their own index on top), and for free.
Also you can self-host a metasearch engine (for example: see here) or use one of the several dozen ones other people self-host and make available to the public.
Indeed, they do have their own index though their search results also include results from various other APIs [1]
