No, there are non-US competitors. Qwant, Mojeek, Seznam... You might reply, "but they're small" or "I haven't heard of them". Well, how do you think that came to be?
Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.
Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option.
Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them?
Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized.
I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results.
I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.
It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking.
Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done.
Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.
Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.