Ask yourself — where do you go when you need to find a product, a service, or information? For the vast majority of people in the UK, the answer is Google. It is estimated they handle around 90% of all search queries made in this country (reducing now due to AI). That level of dominance is, in one sense, remarkable. The Google brand is so deeply embedded in everyday life that it has become a verb, appearing in dictionaries and encyclopaedias as part of the English language itself. No other type of business would ever be permitted to hold 90% of a market — and yet here we are.
"This article is about Search Engines, but it applies to Social Media also! Maybe even more!"
But within this dominance lies a serious problem. One I believe is worth arguing about..
The Problem With One Corporation Controlling Discovery
Every UK business — from the sole trader in Teesside to the high street retailer in Manchester, from the manufacturer in the Midlands to the insurance broker in Edinburgh — depends on Google algorithm to be found online. If your business has any kind of online presence, and most now do, you are subject to rules written by an American corporation operating thousands of miles away.
The Google algorithm determines whether your website ranks or not. And while Google frames this as a pursuit of better search results, the reality is that the processes which govern ranking consistently favour large corporations. Those with the budget to invest heavily in content, technical infrastructure, and link acquisition will always outrank smaller competitors — not because they offer a better product or service, but because they can afford to give Google more of what it wants.
This creates a troubling dynamic. British businesses are not served by Google. They serve Google. Time, money, and resource are poured into satisfying an algorithm that was not designed with British business in mind. Companies have folded as a direct result of poor online visibility — not because what they offered wasn't good enough, but because they couldn't compete in a system built to reward scale and spending power.
British business should never be controlled by a single foreign corporation.
The Economic Impact on UK Businesses
The financial cost of this dependency is significant and largely invisible. Businesses across the UK collectively spend billions each year on SEO services, Google Ads, and the technical overhead required to remain visible in search. Much of that money flows directly out of the UK economy.
Pay Per Click advertising on Google is funnelled through Google's European operations, historically based in Ireland, meaning the tax generated by British businesses advertising to British customers does not remain within the British tax system. This is not a trivial point. It represents a structural drain on public revenue at a time when support for small and medium businesses has never been more important.
Beyond advertising spend, there is the hidden cost of volatility. Google updates its algorithm regularly, and a single update can wipe out years of hard-won rankings overnight. Businesses that have built their entire customer acquisition strategy around organic search have no recourse. They are at the mercy of decisions they had no part in making, announced with little warning, by a company with no accountability to them whatsoever.
The AI Problem: Who Controls What We See, Think, and Believe
There is a dimension to this argument that has grown considerably more urgent in recent years, and it cannot be ignored.
AI systems — the kind now embedded in search results, answer engines, and conversational tools used by millions of people every day — are trained on the data generated by search behaviour. What people search for, what they click on, what they read, how long they stay, what they ignore. This behavioural data, accumulated at extraordinary scale, is the raw material from which AI models learn to understand the world. And the entity sitting at the centre of that data collection, in the UK, is Google.
This creates a feedback loop that should concern everyone. Google's algorithm decides what content surfaces. The content that surfaces shapes what people read and believe. That reading behaviour feeds back into the data used to train AI systems. And those AI systems are then deployed to influence search results further, recommend content, generate answers, and increasingly, mediate the information diet of entire populations.
At no point in this cycle is there meaningful democratic oversight. At no point does the British public, or the British government, have a seat at the table.
The algorithm is not neutral. Every decision about what to rank, what to suppress, what to surface as an answer, and what to train an AI model on, is a value judgement. It reflects the priorities, incentives, and worldview of the corporation that built it. And that corporation is accountable to its shareholders, not to us.
Corporations Should Not Control Our Culture or Our Politics
This is the heart of the argument.
When a single foreign corporation controls a large proportion of how information is discovered in a country, it holds enormous influence over public understanding. What businesses people find. What health information they read. What news they encounter. What political ideas they are exposed to — and in what order, with what framing, and with what prominence.
Search engines and the AI systems built on top of them are not passive directories. They are active editorial systems, making millions of decisions per second about what matters and what doesn't. The difference between appearing on the first page of results and the third is, for most businesses and most pieces of content, the difference between being seen and being invisible.
That editorial power — over commerce, over culture, over the flow of information in a democratic society — should not rest with any single private corporation. And it certainly should not rest with one operating under a foreign jurisdiction, optimising for advertising revenue, running on algorithms the public cannot inspect, challenge, or hold to account.
We already understand this principle in other contexts. We have media ownership rules precisely because we recognise the danger of too much editorial power concentrating in too few hands. We regulate broadcasters. We scrutinise newspaper proprietors. Yet we have allowed something far more pervasive than any newspaper or television channel to operate without equivalent scrutiny.
A national search engine would not solve every aspect of this problem. But it would create a space — governed by public interest principles, transparent in its operation, accountable to British institutions — where that editorial power is exercised differently. Where the algorithm serves the people using it, not the shareholders funding it.
The Case for a Dedicated National Search Engine
So what if there were a British search engine — one whose purpose was not to extract value from UK businesses, but to actively support them?
Imagine a search engine built around the following principles:
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- Only businesses registered at a British address are listed, removing the noise of international results and making it far easier for users to find genuinely local and national providers.
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- All revenue generated through advertising stays within the British tax system, contributing to the public finances rather than disappearing into overseas holding structures
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- No third-party data is collected on searches — not on adults, and certainly not on children. Search history would be private by design, not as an afterthought.
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- The algorithm exists to serve the businesses listed within it, not the other way around. Visibility is earned through relevance and quality, not through the ability to outspend competitors.
I want to be absolutely clear: a National Search Engine is not a political idea in any partisan sense. It is an infrastructure argument — the same way roads, broadband, and the postal service are infrastructure arguments. It should attract support from across the political spectrum, because the businesses it would serve span every constituency in the country.
Google would continue to exist. For many users, it would remain their first choice. But having a credible alternative — one built in British interests, governed by British standards, and accountable to British users — can only be a positive development.
Data Privacy and Digital Sovereignty
There is a broader conversation happening across Europe and beyond about digital sovereignty — the idea that nations should have meaningful control over the data generated by their citizens and the infrastructure through which that data flows.
A national search engine would, by design, keep search data within UK jurisdiction. There would be no ambiguity about where data is stored, who has access to it, or how it might be used. For users, this means genuine privacy. For regulators, it means meaningful oversight. For businesses, it means competing on a platform that is not simultaneously harvesting their customers' behavioural data to sell back to them as advertising.
Parents need not wrry that data is not be collected on their childrens search data or social media use, that may be used for marketing or political benefits in the future.
What Other Countries Have Done
The UK is not alone in recognising the risks of over-reliance on a small number of American technology platforms. Several countries have already taken steps, with varying degrees of success, to develop alternatives.
Russia built Yandex, which now handles the majority of domestic search in that country. China operates behind its own ecosystem entirely, with Baidu as the dominant search engine. South Korea has Naver, which remains highly competitive with Google domestically. These are not perfect models — some carry their own political complications — but they demonstrate that national search infrastructure is achievable, and that it can command genuine user adoption when it is built thoughtfully and given institutional support.
The difference in the UK is that we would not be building a censored or closed system. We would be building something transparent, privacy-respecting, and genuinely in service of the people and businesses it lists.
Why Private Competition Wouldn't Work
You might ask: why hasn't the private sector solved this already? The honest answer is that competing with Google on commercial terms is almost impossible. Even Microsoft, with its enormous resources and the backing of Bing, has failed to make meaningful inroads into Google's UK market share. A privately funded British search engine would face the same fate — likely starved of traffic, dismissed by users out of habit, and potentially undermined by Google's ability to control the Android and Chrome ecosystems through which most searches begin.
Private competition also brings its own conflicts of interest. A search engine funded by advertising is ultimately incentivised to serve advertisers, not users or the businesses listed within it. That is precisely the problem we are trying to solve.
This Needs Government Backing
This cannot be a commercial venture. For it to work, it needs the kind of institutional trust that only government sponsorship can provide — the same trust that makes people rely on the BBC for news, the NHS for health information, or the Met Office for weather. It needs to be created by a credible public institution, maintained with public accountability, and insulated from the commercial pressures that would eventually corrupt its purpose.
The model already exists. The BBC is trusted precisely because it is not driven by profit. A national search engine operating on similar principles — funded, accountable, and serving the public interest — could earn the same trust over time.
The search engine would exist to help the businesses and people within it. Not the other way around.
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