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Comment by JackPoach | Hacker News Reader

Yes, EU kind of 'outsourced' large part of technical platforms to US much like what happened to NATO (many european countries don't have real military forces to speak of and rely on US armed forces for protection). EU has no search engine to speak of. European antiviruses are a joke. There's no european 'office suite' that I know of. Should the United States apply the pressure, Europe has very little to counter the pressure with.

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While I agree about our lack of (usable) search engine, I disagree on your second claim. Europe has a strong background in cybersecurity. Kaspersky is Russian (to be fair, not EU), Avast is Czech, ESET is Slovak, AVG was also Czech before bought by Avast. All of them are popular antivirus programs used today.

UK's Sophos isn't exactly struggling. Always one of the better ones back when individual anti virus mattered. Their Network Protection - UTM still seems well thought of. I think it's even free for home use.

Completely unlike the vastly over priced marketing junk of McAfee and Symantec that got pre-installed on just about every Windows machine. First thing to do with a friends machine? Get them to install something else instead and see the performance gain!

Oh, and Spybot Search and Destroy (German) was first choice for getting rid of the crap Norton and McAffee happily let in for about half a decade or more, and just about only choice for a while.

Qwant.com is European.

And very European in that it favours user privacy.

Yeah, but last I checked, I think half a year ago, they were (still?) getting their results piped from Microsoft's Bing search engine.

I'd find it more important to develop the search engine technology than to, well... just rebrand another US search engine, essentially...

The problem with some of these European initiatives is that they sound more like a political project than a technical one. Lots of "values" being discussed – granted, decent values to support – but very little technology.

Perhaps I'm too jaded an engineer, but if a solid product or technical idea isn't at the base of a project, no amount of values and goodwill is going to glue it together into a reliable working whole.

Mojeek (mojeek.com) is truly independent search engine. Many others are just resellers of Bing results, like Oscobo (oscobo.com). Yandex (yandex.com) is also quite nice.

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