Eh, there are some search engines in the EU, the notable one I know about is MetaGer, but apparently they had to stop supporting their free, ad-supported service due to Yahoo ending its contract with them. But it’s based in Germany and still exists today.
That said, it’s a meta search engine and I don’t think it has its own index, but who knows, maybe if enough people sign up, they’ll work on their own engine some day.