I care about European tech sovereignty and alternatives to Google. But when it comes to serving the Irish market specifically, how do those alternatives actually perform?
I want to use a European alternative to Google, and I periodically check whether any are actually ready. This is the test I devised to find out: a single query — "Taoiseach."
Why "Taoiseach"?
Taoiseach is the Irish (Gaelic) word that means leader. It is also the term we use in Ireland for the office of prime minister. This works well as a barometer for search localisation:
-
Distinctly Irish — it immediately signals Irish context
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Heavily covered in Irish media — it appears constantly in RTÉ, The Irish Times, TheJournal.ie, The Irish Independent, Newstalk and others
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Strong official presence — gov.ie, taoiseach.ie, and related departmental sites rank for it
-
Rarely used in foreign media — if an engine surfaces international sources for it before Irish sources, localisation is probably failing
A clarification: this isn't about the Irish language. Ireland is mainly an English-speaking country, and the test runs entirely in English. The question is whether search engines return Irish-relevant content for a fundamentally Irish term.
The assumption: if you don't get Irish results for Taoiseach, you won't get Irish results for anything.
Test Preconditions
Every search engine was configured identically:
|
Setting |
Value |
|---|---|
|
Language |
English |
|
Region/Locale |
Ireland |
|
Query |
"taoiseach" |
|
Timeframe |
Single-day snapshot |
All six engines offer a region setting, and Ireland was selected on each.
The Results
|
Search Engine |
Web Results Origin |
News Results Origin |
|---|---|---|
|
|
Very Good |
Excellent |
|
Bing |
Very Good |
Excellent |
|
Ecosia |
Good |
Excellent |
|
Qwant |
Good |
Very Poor (UK-heavy) |
|
Startpage |
Good |
Very Poor (UK/US-heavy) |
|
Mojeek |
Sparse relevant content |
No news tab at all |
What I Found
The Benchmarks: Google & Bing
Both delivered exactly what I'd expect as an Irish user:
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Official Irish government sources (gov.ie, taoiseach.ie)
-
Major Irish media (RTÉ.ie, The Irish Times, TheJournal.ie)
-
Minimal irrelevant international noise
- Timely, with recent relevant web pages comign up top
Takeaway: This is the baseline any alternative needs to match.
The Best European Option: Ecosia
With Ireland selected as its region, Ecosia performed well:
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The Irish Times, RTÉ, and TheJournal.ie all visible
-
Government sources ranked appropriately
-
Overall quality comparable to Bing
Here's the catch: Ecosia uses Bing's search index. Its ability to serve Irish results comes largely from leaning on Microsoft's infrastructure, not from building something independently superior.
Takeaway: the best European option, but it leverages a US index.
The Underperformers
Qwant showed a clear UK bias on news: Belfast Telegraph, Evening Standard, and The Guardian dominated, with minimal Irish domestic media. Like Ecosia it relies on Bing's index — but with different regional weighting, and worse results.
The main search page had Irish results were relevant and comparable to Ecosia.
Startpage news failed the basic test outright: news results included a SheFinds article about Donald Trump Jr.'s wife from 17 days earlier as its top result.
The main search page had Irish results were relevant and comparable to Ecosia.
Mojeek had the region set but still fell short: sparse coverage of timely Irish content, no separate news results but some out of date tabloid news sources in the top half of the first page of main search results.
What This Tells Me
1. US Engines Set the Bar
|
Engine |
Country of Origin |
Overall Localisation Quality |
|---|---|---|
|
|
American |
Excellent |
|
Bing |
American |
Excellent |
|
Ecosia |
Germany |
Very Good |
|
Qwant |
France |
Poor |
|
Startpage |
Netherlands (but American owned) |
Poor |
|
Mojeek |
UK |
Insufficient |
American-owned engines don't just localise well — they set the standard. European alternatives aren't catching up by being European; they perform acceptably only when they tap into American infrastructure.
2. Regional Settings Don't Guarantee Anything
All six engines had Ireland selected as the region. Yet Startpage and Qwant still delivered predominantly UK and US results. Offering a country dropdown doesn't mean the algorithm actually weights regional sources. If the underlying index and ranking aren't tuned for Ireland, the setting is decorative.
What About EUSP — the European Search Perspective?
Ecosia and Qwant announced a joint venture, the European Search Perspective (EUSP), in late 2024 to build independent European search infrastructure. In theory, this should reduce reliance on Bing and Google.
The problem for Irish users: EUSP explicitly targets the French and German markets.
Bottom line: Ecosia works for Ireland today precisely because it uses Bing's index. When/if EUSP replaces that index, there's no guarantee Irish results will be maintained unless EUSP expands to cover all EU locales.
Is the only solution an Irish project?
Maybe waiting for an EU alternative is pointless. EUSP won't help. Qwant won't help. Startpage won't help. They're all optimised for other markets.
The answer might be building an Irish search index. It wouldn't need to be massive because Ireland is not a massive market. It would need to:
|
Requirement |
What It Means |
|---|---|
|
Prioritise .ie domains |
Weight Irish websites higher in rankings |
|
Frequent news crawling |
Hourly recrawls of RTÉ, The Irish Times, TheJournal.ie, etc. |
|
Leave international results to others |
Why not rely on Bing for international search results in the same way other European alternatives do? |
Such an index could power multiple search engines. Irish developers could build interfaces on top of it. Irish startups could build products on it. It would be infrastructure for Ireland's digital ecosystem.
Why hasn't this happened? Probably:
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No clear funding model, either public or private
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No public interest in in competing with major employers such as Google and Bing. From an Irish point of view these are almost Irish providers themselves.
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Individual developers lack the resources to compete
Is there a market?
If you look at search engine usage stats in Ireland over the last year; interestingly, Ecosia is the only European search engine that breaks out of the 'Other' category (0.31% vs 0.29% for everything else combined).
Is this because it beats the others European players in terms of localisation or are there other reasons behind this?
Conclusion
So, is there scope for an Irish search index? I think the Taoiseach test proves the gap exists: no European alternative can currently serve Irish users as well as the American engines do. Whether anything fills that gap is a harder question.
Should government be involved? Possibly — state funding for digital infrastructure wouldn't be unprecedented, and an index serving Irish media, businesses and culture is arguably a public good. But it doesn't need government. A focused crawl of Irish sources is a modest engineering project, not a Google-scale one.
Is the market big enough? Ireland is small — roughly five million people — but that's the point. An Irish index doesn't need trillions of pages; it needs depth on .ie and Irish-relevant domains, with international results delegated to a partner index, exactly the hybrid model the European engines already use.
What would it cost? Modestly, by tech-industry standards: a few VMs, an open-source crawler like Apache Nutch, and the discipline to recrawl Irish news sites hourly. The real barrier isn't money — it's that nobody has taken ownership of the idea.
My honest conclusion: tech sovereignty sounds appealing, but for Irish users it currently comes at the cost of localisation. Until a European engine — or an Irish project — treats Ireland as a market worth tuning for, the sovereignty/localisation trade-off stays.