Continental Europe tends towards having many "good" institutions at the expense of not having the extreme stand-outs like Stanford, MIT, or Harvard. There are also departments within universities which are excellent and well-known in their fields without being as well-known by the general public, as well as research institutes separate from universities, like the Max-Planck societies or EMBL.

Overall, I'd say the model makes it harder for something like Google to be created in Europe, but it makes it easier to get an education that will get you a job at Google.

The UK alone also has places like Imperial College, UCL, Warwick and Manchester, with top-notch CS departments. In Scotland alone there's Glasgow (birthplace of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler) and Edinburgh (birthplace of Prolog).

As another commenter noted, mainland Europe tends to spread their academic resources rather than focusing on a few prestige sites like Oxford and Cambridge, but there are many fantastic CS departments. I don't know the current hot areas, but when I was a researcher in the early 2000s, there was lots of Haskell activity in Chalmers and TU Berlin.