European Parliament makes Qwant its default search engine
From 4 June 2026 the European Parliament made the French engine Qwant the default search in its Edge and Firefox browsers, replacing Google — a concrete tech-sovereignty win for a European alternative.
From 4 June 2026, the European Parliament has set the French search engine Qwant as the default in the Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers used across the institution, replacing Google. A Parliament spokesperson confirmed the change in a statement to reporters.
The switch reaches the Parliament’s 720 members along with thousands of assistants and administrative staff. It applies automatically, though users remain free to select another search engine. The move lands within days of the European Commission’s wider tech-sovereignty push and is explicitly framed as a step to reduce the institution’s reliance on non-EU digital tools.
Qwant is a privacy-first engine that does not use tracking cookies, behavioural ad profiles, or long-term search-history retention, and it is already the default across the French public administration. Since May 2026 it has served results from EUSP, the independent European search index it co-built with Ecosia, cutting its long-standing dependence on Microsoft’s Bing index.
For a catalogue built around European alternatives, the significance is less the software than the procurement decision behind it: a major EU institution choosing a home-grown, EU-hosted search engine over the default incumbent. It is the kind of public-sector adoption that turns “European alternative” from a talking point into an operational baseline.