EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignSearch EnginesHeadquarters: SE

Marginalia Search: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Marginalia Search is an independent search engine with its own index and crawler. It gives priority to non-commercial, text-oriented websites and helps surface small sites and older pages that are barely visible in mainstream search engines. According to its maker it filters out tracking, shares no data with third parties and uses no AI. Developers can use an API with filtering options. The service is mainly a hosted public search engine.

According to the project site, Marginalia Search is operated from Sweden by a single developer, with no legal entity named; funding comes from donations, grants and API agreements. The code is open source under the AGPL and can also be run as your own search engine over your own crawled data. Under its privacy policy, IP addresses are kept for at most 24 hours, there are no tracking cookies or requests to third parties, and no click data is gathered. Where the servers are located is not published. Work on multilingual support was co-funded through the EU's NGI Zero programme, run by NLnet.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Marginalia Search pre-selected
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Sovereignty score
94 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-6100
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 16, 2026
Headquarters
SE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Search Engines
Type
Product
Website
marginalia-search.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Marginalia Search

The European alternatives to Marginalia Search come from our knowledge base of over 9,500 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

17 European Search Engines vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Marginalia Search

Marginalia Search is headquartered in SE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Marginalia Search scores best on data residency.

Marginalia Search is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Marginalia Search together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Marginalia Search?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Marginalia Search include Ecosia, Lilo and MetaGer. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Marginalia Search?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Marginalia Search include MetaGer. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Marginalia Search GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Marginalia Search is headquartered in SE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Marginalia Search an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 16, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

Digital sovereignty in Search Engines

Search Engines: Search engines — privacy-friendly web searching. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Marginalia Search — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score