In the battle for online privacy, U.S. search giant Google is a Goliath facing a handful of European Davids.
The backlash over Big Tech's collection of personal data offers new hope to a number of little-known search engines that promise to protect user privacy.
Sites like Britain's Mojeek , France's Qwant , Unbubble in Germany and Swisscows say they don't track user data, filter results or show "behavioral" ads.
These sites are growing amid the rollout of new European privacy regulations, numerous corporate data scandals and even comments by high-profile tech executives such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, which have combined to raise public awareness about the mountains of personal information that companies stealthily collect and sell to advertisers.
Widespread suspicion in Europe about Google's stranglehold on internet searches has also helped make the continent a spawning ground for secure search sites. Europe is particularly sensitive to privacy issues because spying by the Nazi-era Gestapo and the secret services in the Soviet Union is still within living memory.
"For us, it's all about citizens and citizens have the right to privacy," said Eric Leandri, chairman of Paris-based Qwant. He said that view contrasts with the mindset across the Atlantic, where internet users are seen as consumers whose rights are dictated by the terms of their agreements with tech companies.
Traffic numbers show interest is rising. Qwant handled nearly 10 billion queries in 2017, more than triple the previous year. On a monthly basis, it's getting 80 million visits while requests are growing 20 percent. Leandri says the site now accounts for 6 percent of search engine market share in France, its biggest market.
Qwant is even getting official support. Last month the French army and parliament both said they would drop Google and use Qwant as their default search engine, as part of efforts to reclaim European "digital sovereignty."
The site doesn't use tracking cookies or profile users, allowing it to give two different users the exact same result. It has built its own index of 20 billion pages covering French, German and Italian. It plans to expand the index to about two dozen other languages, for which it currently relies on results from Microsoft's Bing.