Very Large Online Search Engine

In 2022, the European Union passed a law for the internet called the Digital Services Act. In it, providers are divided into groups according to their size. One of these groups is search engines with an especially large number of users in Europe. The English term for this is Very Large Online Search Engine, abbreviated VLOSE. The threshold is an average of 45 million active users per month in the EU. That corresponds to roughly ten percent of all people in the Union. Anyone above that is officially designated by the EU Commission and receives additional obligations.

Why the EU sorts search engines separately

A search engine co-determines which information millions of people even get to see. Whoever ranks first in a search for a medication, an election, or a war event has enormous influence. With a small provider, poor ranking hardly attracts attention. With a service handling hundreds of millions of search queries daily, the same mistake can affect an entire society.

That is why the law follows a simple logic: more reach means more responsibility. Small blogs and niche portals only need to fulfill basic obligations, such as removing illegal content after a notification. Very large services must additionally systematically examine what harm they could cause. The law calls this examination a risk assessment.

It is important to distinguish this from a related term. A Very Large Online Platform, or VLOP for short, is a very large platform such as a social network or a marketplace. There, users post content themselves. A search engine, by contrast, does not create its own content but points to other sites. Because this role is different, the EU has created a separate category for search engines.

From user numbers to designation

The process begins with the providers themselves. They must publish, at least every six months, how many active users they have in the EU on a monthly average. If this number exceeds 45 million, the EU Commission can designate the service as a Very Large Online Search Engine by decision. Four months after the designation, the stricter rules apply.

After that, the provider must produce a risk assessment every year. This examines, for example, whether the search spreads targeted disinformation, endangers minors, or can influence elections. Countermeasures are required for every identified risk. In addition, independent auditors check once a year whether the provider is truly fulfilling its obligations. The company pays for this audit itself, but the result is published.

Further obligations are added. The provider must maintain a public archive of all advertisements placed. It must give researchers access to data so they can independently investigate risks. And if results are personally tailored, there must be an alternative without such profiling. The EU Commission can penalize violations with fines of up to six percent of worldwide annual turnover.

Which services are affected

The Commission designated the first very large services in April 2023. Among the search engines, these were Google Search and Bing. Both reach significantly more than 45 million users per month in the EU. Smaller search engines such as Ecosia or Startpage fall below the threshold and are therefore not considered Very Large Online Search Engines.

In the news, the term usually appears when the EU Commission opens proceedings or imposes new requirements. Increasingly, this often concerns AI functions in search, such as automatically generated answer summaries above the results lists. Such functions fall under the same risk assessment as the classic results list.

A common misconception is that the status is an award for quality. The opposite is true: it is a classification as a particularly influential service, tied to oversight and costs. For you as a user, the difference becomes noticeable mainly in visible details, such as explanations of why a result is displayed.