EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignSearch EnginesHeadquarters: DE

MetaGer: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

MetaGer is a German metasearch engine centred on privacy. It combines results from several large web indexes, including Bing, Mojeek and Brave Search, and its own crawlers. Users can choose search engines and keep a personal blacklist. The "Open Anonymously" function loads a result page through an anonymising proxy, and access via Tor is available. Ad-free search is possible through a key system. According to the operator, MetaGer does not store IP addresses or user agents. The service is delivered through the web.

MetaGer is a project of the German non-profit association SUMA-EV, which administers the services itself on hardware rented from Hetzner Online GmbH, a German company. There is no foreign parent. The source code has been public under the GNU AGPL licence since 2016. Because queries are relayed to partner search engines, non-European providers may supply results for them; the server location is not stated explicitly.

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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 July 2, 2026
HeadquartersDE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty modelVendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Compliance documents1 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signalHETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH, DE (DE)Technically measured
CategorySearch Engines
TypeProduct
Websitemetager.org ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to MetaGer

The European alternatives to MetaGer come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 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

15 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 MetaGer

MetaGer is headquartered in DE 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 MetaGer scores best on data residency.

MetaGer 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 MetaGer 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 MetaGer?

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

Are there open-source alternatives to MetaGer?

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

Is MetaGer GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

MetaGer is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes MetaGer 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 July 2, 2026.

Sources

This record was checked via the vendor's website and legal notice during the full audit of June and July 2026. Source links have been recorded per record since 20 September 2026.

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".

Security page / trust center
metager.org/datenschutz

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

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.

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