It will also help insofar as site owners will be less inclined to block "EUROPEAN SEARCH INDEX CRAWLER", just as they're less inclined to block google, despite being inclined to block "small time search index".

The creative, non-capital intensive part where having a diverse ecosystem will help the most is building a layer on top of the index to actually find stuff - e.g. a bit like how duckduckgo is built atop bing's index.

But the European taxpayer should absolutely pay for it.

Need not to be more complicated than that. It is not like Google is the same darling it once was at home either. The public now has an appetite to go after US big techs not vice versa.

And Google won't have a valid defense against it, unless the US government comes to play

A basic web crawler is not. A semantic web crawler and associated search engine capable of mapping real human input to useful information and dealing with the heterogeneous structure of data on the web, with low millisecond latency?

Bing has been working on that problem for years now, how come they haven't caught up more with Google?

But then again, there are also a lot of other problems Microsoft haven't been able to solve...

I'm unsure if that continues to be true if the EU siphons money off of them to build a direct competitor.

Or in some other other gradual way. Anyway: it's not a binary over-night thing based on a whim of some dictator.

Either way, I fully trust the competency of the people running these things; they have proven themselves in the past. I'm writing that as a Swedish citizen who is a little bit skeptic about whole the EU thing. This part though - I trust these EU bureaucrats. My impression is that there's a team of very sharp people working on this.

Google already payed a bit, now EU can begin :D