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Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

214 points by kome 9y ago

cinquemb 9y ago
Idk, not to disparage services like these, I'm sure they can be valuable to some degree from some threat actors, But I think on a personal level, one would think that the user should take a more adversarial role to protect their privacy rather to rely on Bottled Privacy™.
- ACow_Adonis 9y ago
  “Why Don’t We Have Both?” is a meme for a reason :P
  - cinquemb 9y ago
    Well at least for me, I'll wait for a non JS endpoint before trying some of this…
pmontra 9y ago
I'll try to use it but those news on the search page... I'm there to search, not to read news. There is an addon for Firefox to use it as a search engine: https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-fir...
- r-w 9y ago
  I believe you can choose what you'd like to see.
- eveningcoffee 9y ago
  It was possible to close and turn off the news panels and it is possible to see only web results (by clicking on the left panel). This choice is unfortunately not remembered.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    The downside of being "cookie free" - instant forgetting of your preferences.
    - llukas 9y ago
      Not really - it seems that you can set your settings and get url that remembers them. "If you haven't created a Qwant account to save your settings, you can use the following link as a homepage or drag it into your bookmarks: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&h=0&hc=1&a=1&s=1&b=1&i=1&r=US&sr=en" https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&h=0&hc=1&a=1&s=1&b=1&i=1&r=US&sr...
      - mwbnoe0n2nt 9y ago
        Well that's nice and all, but how is a typical user supposed to find and understand that? (Also drag it into your bookmarks? I don't know a single user who will understand that that's a thing.)
pmoriarty 9y ago
I can't view the page either with emacs-w3m nor with w3m itself. So that's one thing that DDG has over Qwant for me: it works with my browsers.
- Insanity 9y ago
  I like w3m and am a DDG user, but you have to admit you are using quite an esoteric browser:-)
  - erlehmann_ 9y ago
    Basic web site functionality should work in any browser.
    - trothamel 9y ago
      If browsers can't keep up with basic web site functionality, they risk becoming irrelevant.
- 256 9y ago
  Have you tried lite.qwant.com? It's pretty usable for me in w3m, although still not as nice as DDG.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    Thanks. lite.qwant.com seems to work. Now I have to find a way to make it not give me indirect links like: https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/IDSLFJKsdf99wejweiDFISDJFL929w9ejfsdifdsjli=/https://en.wikipedia.org/ https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/IDSLFJKsdf99wejweiDFISDJFL92... But give me direct links instead, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/ On DDG this can be done by appending &kd=-1 to the URL.
eveningcoffee 9y ago
Image results is using either too big or too low resolution images that are irritating to look at. Could be solved by making images smaller or increasing resolution.
jondubois 9y ago
That's nice but it needs better support for indexing JavaScript single page apps. Right now only Google seems to be doing it properly.
- flukus 9y ago
  That sounds like a feature, punishing poorly made "apps" that require javascript.
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted, I'd use the shit out of a search engine that was optimized for sites that don't use javascript for basic functionality.
doesnt_know 9y ago
60 requests, Loaded in 6.49s. Cripes, if you don't have some marketing department shoving tracking scripts all over the place against your will what's your excuse?
- starik36 9y ago
  I got a question from our marketing department why it takes a while for our website to load just the other day. My answer was exactly what you mentioned - forcing us to include tracking scripts from google analytics, tag manager, oracle maximizer, segment, facebook, doubleclick and a handful of other monstrosities that do god only knows what on startup.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Prediction: no change will take place because someone else will say 'without that data, we're flying blind.'
- ludston 9y ago
  Definitely a problem. I had 10.24s on first load, which is about 9 seconds longer after google/duckduckgo becomes usable.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  Because DDG and Google search don't show dozens of media files on its search page. They really need to default to a simple search page, and then they can give users the option to use the current richer theme. This product reminds me of the one developed by Wolframalpha a couple years ago with a fancy interface.
- rbag 9y ago
  You can try the lite version that should be the default version IMHO: https://lite.qwant.com https://lite.qwant.com
gerdesj 9y ago
So where is the bloody product? The silly little link on the about site is easy to miss. Quite like it on first use. I've been meaning to ditch Google (can't be arsed with "do do no evil" anymore) for a while now and this looks like a good start.
- gerdesj 9y ago
  I'm now close to convinced but the domain is .com - fair enough for world use but this sells itself as an EU based affair. Be who you are (says the MD of a UK company with a .net email address!) I genuinely hope this works as advertised but I am having a bloody hard time finding out what is behind the scenes from the about website. I will stick with it because their advertised basic premise strikes a note with me.
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    I simply fired up Firefox and searched (probably via G) for "quanta" and got a pretty severe Google notice. Now I know what I am going to do. Bye Google - I was a customer for around 20 years. I'm off.
    - jsnell 9y ago
      What exactly do you mean by "a pretty severe Google notice"?
lukeqsee 9y ago
I'm not seeing any advantage over duckduckgo.com. I want a search engine that loads quickly and gives good results, DDG does that while protecting my privacy.
- beefsack 9y ago
  Do you remember DDG five years ago? Everyone needs to start somewhere. One potential advantage is it's run out of Europe instead of the US, which is significant for certain people.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Exactly. I still use !g with DDG if I can't find something; but 1/3 of the time DDG works just fine. Back in the day you'd go to Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, et. al. and you'd get different results! There was a difference with search engines that would leads you to all kinds of interesting stuff. Today it's all monolithic. It's going to be either indexed by Google or on some mega walled garden like FB/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. We need more alternative search engines. I personally stopped using the verb "Googled" and try to say "Searched for" instead. The world needs to be more than just Google.
  - dx034 9y ago
    I'd love if DDG would provide a European version. A subdomain that redirects to data only hosted in the EU. Not sure how hard that would be to accomplish but I'm sure it'd be a good argument for many to start using it.
- tudorw 9y ago
  some competition, that's an advantage ;)
rollo 9y ago
I'm really liking it so far. I was able to find some obscure stuff that google failed me on with image search, using rather ridiculous queries. A few random searches also returned more relevant results on the first page. Will definitely keep using it for a while to see if this keeps up.
anigbrowl 9y ago
It's OK, reasonably fast, and I do like the interface, but search results as a list is so 1990s. Give me the result as a DAG. Give me sort options. Let me pin a result and then iterate in relation to it. Show me something different, not the same thing as everyone else with a promise about my privacy and some different graphical sugar. To beat the established competitors you don't need to be incrementally better, you need to be qualitatively different. I do prefer it DDG, at least for desktop use, because it's actually using the whole of my screen for a change. But wow me with something. I haven't had that in a while.
themihai 9y ago
Nice, but I want an open source one with open datasets so that I know for sure what they are storing and eventually allow others to develop alternative engines. Nevertheless some competition in the search engine world is never bad.
- mstef 9y ago
  you should have a look at searx instead, is also from the eu, and is completely free software, so free, that you as a user can demand the source code of the instance running due to the agpl license.
  - bobajeff 9y ago
    I like searx myself. To bad I can't get the search suggestions to work in the address bar. Also, I wish there was an app to run it off of your phone. It would be nice to not have to use a public instance.
dingo_bat 9y ago
Will they censor results like EU has been forcing Google to do?
- mirimir 9y ago
  Based in EU, I can't see how they wouldn't. I don't want censored search.
  - ehllo 9y ago
    If you mean the "Right to be Forgotten", you should know that there is a clear difference between censorship and this ruling. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...
- C14L 9y ago
  You mean, follow the law? Yes. Shocking, isn't it?
  - briandear 9y ago
    So people seem to want a privacy-protecting search engine that provides censored results based on the whims of governments. Ok, that is logical. Did a single person in the EU willingly vote for a censored web? Does anyone actually want the government of France Germany or Turkey deciding what websites you are allowed to visit? Why not put all the servers in a location that actually respects freedom and not censor anything AND not track us? That would be something I would be interested in. The whole concept of geo-restricted anything is a ridiculous antithesis to what the internet is supposed to be.
    - jcbrand 9y ago
      Turkey is not part of the EU.
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
I actually like its theme stylistically more than I like DDG. A couple of points of feedback though: - When I go through the lite version (which should almost be the default), if I image search, clicking on the results takes me to the webpage that the image is on, not the image itself. If i wanted that I wouldn't be doing an image search. - There's an "install qwant" button in the top right hand of the screen. I'm not clear what i'd be installing if i clicked on that, or why i should need or want to install anything to use a search engine? - I've gotten two separate front-pages when visiting www.qwant.com on desktop. One is a semi-minimalist page, a bit more complicated than the lite version, but quite nice and clean. If this was the default i'd be happy. The second was a version more reminiscent of the old "yahoo" type setup, with news and stories and random stuff splattered everywhere below the search bar. Subjectively, the second one needs to die. However, i'm not sure why its no longer turning up for me (even though I'm glad it isn't). I certainly haven't saved my account, nor am i consciously using a remembered URL. - I got a captcha type thing popping up saying there'd been a lot of activity from my location. I'm pretty sure I'm not currently behind my VPN, so that seemed weird for me to be seeing such... - On mobile, that just took WAY too long to open. Almost 10 seconds. As others have mentioned, you need to eliminate half the crap and make the rest more responsive. I don't go to search engine to view tabloid stories (or if i did, i'd search for them), i'm there to search. - Its not entirely clear why it seems that the links on the lite page are redirects, but the links on the main page appear to be direct? Is that deliberate? A bug? Obviously one would prefer them all to be direct. - Don't know what's going on, it appeared to me subjectively that the main page was picking up successfully that I was from Australia. However, during one of my searches using the lite page, the options up the top of "web, news, social", etc looked like they were in another language (looked dutch-ish to me).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Zhenya 9y ago
Won't even load the search input field without javascript...
fulafel 9y ago
How is the privacy assurance of this vs DDG? What are the promises and does either proide more than promises?
georgeglue1 9y ago
many privacy search engines like duckduckgo really just query bing or google (sometimes through a proxy)... any idea if qwant does this?
- infbtag 9y ago
  https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-the-web/ https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-th... Although they just show Bing results for me so don't know how much of their own index is actually used.
  - cJ0th 9y ago
    It seems to depend on your location. > In March 2017, news articles revealed Qwant displays mainly search results from Bing, except in France and Germany, despite several commitment to be exclusively "made in France". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism
- kbwt 9y ago
  Yeah, for the queries I tested with it returned the exact same results as Yahoo (which in turn gets its results from Bing). The auto-completions are also very limited, no long tail suggestions at all. They also seem to use Elasticsearch from looking at their job postings, but mostly the focus for hiring seems to be on front-end and scripting.
lawl 9y ago
European here. First of all, this is okay. But not good. I've tried several "slang" searches that google gets just fine. I've tried these because ddg had/has problems with them for a long time. E.g. If I google for "poe shavs" (a slang term for an item with an abbreviation of the game name), I expect https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings from what I've tried this seems to work even without a search history on google. I've tried this across different cookieless browsers and IP's. Google just seems to get it. This seems to return (almost) the exact same shit as bing on Qwant. So I do not see how this is an improvement over bing/ddg/whatever. Man I'd love to get rid of google in my personal life, but... for my searches nobody else seems to perform. Google just seems to know what I want to search, even if I don't have a search history on that machine. Edit: For searches in german it seems to perform similarily shitty to bing. Do they get search results from bing?
- fstephany 9y ago
  I feel like Qwant works much better in french than english.
  - ehllo 9y ago
    I think qwant is a company from france.
- Iv 9y ago
  The thing is, Google improves its results THANKS to its privacy invasion. To understand "poe" as path of exile, it helps to know that you at least once searched for path of exile. After it has seen a few hundreds users do that, it will make the connection. To know that "poe shavs" refers to the game and not Edgar Alan Poe, it probably had to provide a link to a relevant author's name and to the game's page and watch which links people would more likely click. There is a chicken and egg here. People want a search engine that can read their minds without invading their privacy, that's a hard problem.
  - nottorp 9y ago
Marc66FR 9y ago
Been using qwant since it came out and I never looked back: great UI and search results
Symbiote 9y ago
Filtering by page language would be useful. Half of my results for a search query of a scientific term were the Wikipedia pages in other languages.
kakarot 9y ago
The main thing I like about this service is the looks. It's mostly sleek and refreshingly minimal with a colorful and expressive logo to boot, a la Google. DDG on the other hand... while I love the idea and would love to use it more often, not only gives poor results for most of my searches but the heavy use of red literally gives me a physical anxiety that makes it basically unusable. I could style the page myself but they really need to consider losing the red in favor of green or purple or gold because I can't be the only one who experiences this.
- sewer_bird 9y ago
  DGG has about as much red on it as Hacker News: is it such a heavy use of color? At least on desktop in Safari, the site is pretty 'white', and I'm surprised you get literal physical anxiety.
  - kakarot 9y ago
    Interesting! Last time I used the service, about 3-4 months ago, the search results page was awash in red. Now it seems that the style has been much improved to the point of usability. I don't get anxiety like before. FWIW I was/am using Firefox on both Fedora and Windows. How long has DDG had its current look for you?
    - sewer_bird 9y ago
      I think I switched to DDG perhaps 5 months ago, although I'm not sure. Happy ducking, hah!
pjmlp 9y ago
> https://about.qwant.com/job/ninja/ https://about.qwant.com/job/ninja/ What a disappointment, I was expecting some job requirements regarding the handling of shuriken, nunchakus, sword fighting, art of camouflage, ... Ah, and something like the graduation note of Shaolin Temple, in case of attendance.
MichaelMoser123 9y ago
How does qwant pays it bills? How do you do business? I didn't see any advertising, and there are no paid subscriptions, is the project funded by the EU?
- captainmuon 9y ago
  This is an important question, I was wondering the same for very long with DDG. The answer seems to be ads, like everybody else: https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-money/ https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-mon...
  - vagnes 9y ago
    They say: "When you use Qwant, no personal information whatsoever is neither captured or transmitted to advertisers.", but then they also say: "We believe we now have designed a simple and efficient offering by working with the Microsoft Bing ad network." Is it just me, or are these two statements oxymorons?
    - captainmuon 9y ago
      They probably say "give me some ads for keyword 'react js'" and don't pass on your IP or other identifying info. Still a problem if you search for your own name, but I don't think you can do much about that. Or maybe MS provides a bloom table / index of all keywords they currenty have ads for, so you can check "offline" before sending it to them?
- johansch 9y ago
  > is the project funded by the EU? Yes. The EIB "loaned" them 25 million Euro: http://www.eib.org/infocentre/press/releases/all/2015/2015-243-eib-provides-eur-25-million-for-start-up-qwant.htm http://www.eib.org/infocentre/press/releases/all/2015/2015-2...
5kyn3t 9y ago
I think it is great news. Europe is so much behind the US in the IT-Sector. Even russia has a successful search-engine. The default view is a bit overloaded in my opinion... Lite version: https://lite.qwant.com/ https://lite.qwant.com/ A plus point is that qwant also supports hashbangs like duckduckgo.
- itronitron 9y ago
  looks promising, qwanting 'java concurrency' gives a nice set of relevant results
  - DCRichards 9y ago
    I hope that one day when Qwant is big, this is cited as the first use of 'qwanting'
- Annatar 9y ago
  Europe is so much behind the US in the IT-Sector. Isn’t that a sad truth, only made worse by the irony that a lot of us went to work in the States. A lot of Europe is still conceptually stuck in the pre-UNIX, lone desktop Windows/MS-DOS, early ’90’s era, while the rest of the world runs them by with macOS PC’s and iPads. Lots of European UNIX talent left for the States right at the cusp of the dot-com era and helped build the Internet because that’s where all the action was. We never really recovered from that.
  - jjkk0101 9y ago
    I am based in Copenhagen and can see some innovation at the application level but there is a lot of catch-up as well, mostly focused at the nordics internal market. For lower levels of the stack (e.g.: IaaS), there is no way to be competitive against SV without subsidy b/c fwcit there is no access to capital nor enough talents to this problem size. The prospective is not getting any better at the immigration level, the greencard schema has been repelled and companies are having even harder time to attract talent.
  - everyone 9y ago
mfukar 9y ago
I might try it again sometime in the future, when it doesn't take more than 5 seconds to get a result to a query.
a_imho 9y ago
I never understand log in on a search engine. I'm supplying keywords to search for, please don't try to profile and put me in a bubble. After like 2 searches I got: A high amount of connections have been detected from your location and you have been blocked.Please, validate the anti-robot below to be allowed access to the website.
- 5kyn3t 9y ago
  I got the same notification
m12k 9y ago
I don't want privacy to be a parameter that companies compete on, I want to government to enforce something sane that all the companies will then have to follow. Imagine if there were '50% less lead than our competitors' labels on food products.
jk2323 9y ago
Do they run their own crawling server or do they "repack" search request to google like DDG, Startpage or ixquick? If they do it from scratch, kudos.
Nux 9y ago
Privacy loving European here. I want to like it, but it gives off a bad vibe. First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. Give me a text field, I don't care about the news. Second, no easy way to add it in my Firefox search engine list. This is really something obvious they should fix, come on. Third, they want you to install an extension that will indeed set qwant as default search engine, but also seems to try to shove down your throat some sort of bookmark and "board" (their own thing, pinterest like?) management which requires login to their service. http://img.nux.ro/q9M-Menu_292.png http://img.nux.ro/q9M-Menu_292.png IMHO it doesn't really live up to the expectations and it seems more like a social media experiment attempt. If we forego the whole privacy thing which I think they are only using for marketing here, then the search results don't seem too bad (in my 2 minutes of testing) and the boards thing is interesting, but nah.
- AlexAffe 9y ago
  Adding to that: they advertise the app for android. The app wants access to contacts, identity, all available networks (wifi scans) and a bunch of other stuff, where I ask myself why it is needed. I also want(ed) to like it, but you are exactly right about that bad vibe. We finally need a search engine that just costs a monthly fee or gets paid via coinhive or the like....
- myf01d 9y ago
  > First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. Give me a text field, I don't care about the news. I genuinely don't understand this hostile statement. Why do you complain that a website isn't functional in pure html in 2017? do you want the web to look like it's 1998?
  - mrweasel 9y ago
    Why is it a problem to have page functional without Javascript? It's the number one tools for spying on users, so especially if you're a privacy focused search engine, you should except people to have Javascript disabled, until they choose to trust you. There's no real need to javascript on search engines or news sites. There might be some additional features, like polls that will require Javascript, but the base functionality should work. I'm still a firm believer in progressive enhancement, even if it's no longer trendy. Modern Javascript framework however seems to be firmly in the "Javascript or die" camp.
Faaak 9y ago
Sadly, the search engine reports many duplicate results. For example, I searched: "arid land reforestation", and results were (https://screenshots.firefox.com/wl6JuVa5sbWNgy2o/www.qwant.com https://screenshots.firefox.com/wl6JuVa5sbWNgy2o/www.qwant.c...): * 1st: http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... * 2nd: http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... * 4th: http://maestron.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://maestron.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... * 5th: http://pipcoins.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://pipcoins.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... etc, etc. All of which were "bad" websites. It's a shame because some good results (science direct, …) were inside the lot. The content isn't even a pdf. You should implement a "unique" webpage result fingerprint in order to avoid showing duplicates (well, I suppose it's easier said than done..).
dna_polymerase 9y ago
I just did 3 searches on there and 2 times I got a server error. I will try Qwant now as default, but it already feels bad.
leke 9y ago
Looks promising, but my initial searching for Dart lang didn't return any results in News and Social, and unrelated images in the Images search.
throw2016 9y ago
Too busy design wise at the moment and lacking back end details but the results seem decent at first glance. No one can deny competition in search is desperately needed. Without that Google inevitably becomes more emboldened and seeks to further normalize and expand their creepy behavior. An approach for a new engine should be both privacy which is a strong message that will resonate and also the technical details so people don't just assume its consuming another backend. That's what will make it interesting.
slezyr 9y ago
Not sure how it "social" search works, but it gives me a bunch russian bots, when I search "ukraine" https://www.qwant.com/?q=%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0&t=all https://www.qwant.com/?q=%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%B...
gator-io 9y ago
We track usage share of search engines. We do not have Qwant detection at this point, but what I can see: - Out of 7972 sites, 561 have received at least one referral from Qwant. We will need to explore this further to get usable numbers.

214 points by kome 9y ago

Idk, not to disparage services like these, I'm sure they can be valuable to some degree from some threat actors, But I think on a personal level, one would think that the user should take a more adversarial role to protect their privacy rather to rely on Bottled Privacy™.

ACow_Adonis 9y ago
“Why Don’t We Have Both?” is a meme for a reason :P
- cinquemb 9y ago
  Well at least for me, I'll wait for a non JS endpoint before trying some of this…

pmontra 9y ago

I'll try to use it but those news on the search page... I'm there to search, not to read news. There is an addon for Firefox to use it as a search engine: https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-fir...

r-w 9y ago
I believe you can choose what you'd like to see.
eveningcoffee 9y ago
It was possible to close and turn off the news panels and it is possible to see only web results (by clicking on the left panel). This choice is unfortunately not remembered.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  The downside of being "cookie free" - instant forgetting of your preferences.
  - llukas 9y ago
    Not really - it seems that you can set your settings and get url that remembers them. "If you haven't created a Qwant account to save your settings, you can use the following link as a homepage or drag it into your bookmarks: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&h=0&hc=1&a=1&s=1&b=1&i=1&r=US&sr=en" https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&h=0&hc=1&a=1&s=1&b=1&i=1&r=US&sr...
    - mwbnoe0n2nt 9y ago
      Well that's nice and all, but how is a typical user supposed to find and understand that? (Also drag it into your bookmarks? I don't know a single user who will understand that that's a thing.)

pmoriarty 9y ago

I can't view the page either with emacs-w3m nor with w3m itself. So that's one thing that DDG has over Qwant for me: it works with my browsers.

Insanity 9y ago
I like w3m and am a DDG user, but you have to admit you are using quite an esoteric browser:-)
- erlehmann_ 9y ago
  Basic web site functionality should work in any browser.
  - trothamel 9y ago
    If browsers can't keep up with basic web site functionality, they risk becoming irrelevant.
256 9y ago
Have you tried lite.qwant.com? It's pretty usable for me in w3m, although still not as nice as DDG.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Thanks. lite.qwant.com seems to work. Now I have to find a way to make it not give me indirect links like: https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/IDSLFJKsdf99wejweiDFISDJFL929w9ejfsdifdsjli=/https://en.wikipedia.org/ https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/IDSLFJKsdf99wejweiDFISDJFL92... But give me direct links instead, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/ On DDG this can be done by appending &kd=-1 to the URL.

eveningcoffee 9y ago

Image results is using either too big or too low resolution images that are irritating to look at. Could be solved by making images smaller or increasing resolution.

jondubois 9y ago

That's nice but it needs better support for indexing JavaScript single page apps. Right now only Google seems to be doing it properly.

flukus 9y ago
That sounds like a feature, punishing poorly made "apps" that require javascript.
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted, I'd use the shit out of a search engine that was optimized for sites that don't use javascript for basic functionality.

doesnt_know 9y ago

60 requests, Loaded in 6.49s. Cripes, if you don't have some marketing department shoving tracking scripts all over the place against your will what's your excuse?

starik36 9y ago
I got a question from our marketing department why it takes a while for our website to load just the other day. My answer was exactly what you mentioned - forcing us to include tracking scripts from google analytics, tag manager, oracle maximizer, segment, facebook, doubleclick and a handful of other monstrosities that do god only knows what on startup.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Prediction: no change will take place because someone else will say 'without that data, we're flying blind.'
ludston 9y ago
Definitely a problem. I had 10.24s on first load, which is about 9 seconds longer after google/duckduckgo becomes usable.
yeukhon 9y ago
Because DDG and Google search don't show dozens of media files on its search page. They really need to default to a simple search page, and then they can give users the option to use the current richer theme. This product reminds me of the one developed by Wolframalpha a couple years ago with a fancy interface.
rbag 9y ago
You can try the lite version that should be the default version IMHO: https://lite.qwant.com https://lite.qwant.com

gerdesj 9y ago

So where is the bloody product? The silly little link on the about site is easy to miss. Quite like it on first use. I've been meaning to ditch Google (can't be arsed with "do do no evil" anymore) for a while now and this looks like a good start.

gerdesj 9y ago
I'm now close to convinced but the domain is .com - fair enough for world use but this sells itself as an EU based affair. Be who you are (says the MD of a UK company with a .net email address!) I genuinely hope this works as advertised but I am having a bloody hard time finding out what is behind the scenes from the about website. I will stick with it because their advertised basic premise strikes a note with me.
- gerdesj 9y ago
  I simply fired up Firefox and searched (probably via G) for "quanta" and got a pretty severe Google notice. Now I know what I am going to do. Bye Google - I was a customer for around 20 years. I'm off.
  - jsnell 9y ago
    What exactly do you mean by "a pretty severe Google notice"?

lukeqsee 9y ago

I'm not seeing any advantage over duckduckgo.com. I want a search engine that loads quickly and gives good results, DDG does that while protecting my privacy.

beefsack 9y ago
Do you remember DDG five years ago? Everyone needs to start somewhere. One potential advantage is it's run out of Europe instead of the US, which is significant for certain people.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Exactly. I still use !g with DDG if I can't find something; but 1/3 of the time DDG works just fine. Back in the day you'd go to Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, et. al. and you'd get different results! There was a difference with search engines that would leads you to all kinds of interesting stuff. Today it's all monolithic. It's going to be either indexed by Google or on some mega walled garden like FB/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. We need more alternative search engines. I personally stopped using the verb "Googled" and try to say "Searched for" instead. The world needs to be more than just Google.
- dx034 9y ago
  I'd love if DDG would provide a European version. A subdomain that redirects to data only hosted in the EU. Not sure how hard that would be to accomplish but I'm sure it'd be a good argument for many to start using it.
tudorw 9y ago
some competition, that's an advantage ;)

rollo 9y ago

I'm really liking it so far. I was able to find some obscure stuff that google failed me on with image search, using rather ridiculous queries. A few random searches also returned more relevant results on the first page. Will definitely keep using it for a while to see if this keeps up.

anigbrowl 9y ago

It's OK, reasonably fast, and I do like the interface, but search results as a list is so 1990s. Give me the result as a DAG. Give me sort options. Let me pin a result and then iterate in relation to it. Show me something different, not the same thing as everyone else with a promise about my privacy and some different graphical sugar. To beat the established competitors you don't need to be incrementally better, you need to be qualitatively different. I do prefer it DDG, at least for desktop use, because it's actually using the whole of my screen for a change. But wow me with something. I haven't had that in a while.

themihai 9y ago

Nice, but I want an open source one with open datasets so that I know for sure what they are storing and eventually allow others to develop alternative engines. Nevertheless some competition in the search engine world is never bad.

mstef 9y ago
you should have a look at searx instead, is also from the eu, and is completely free software, so free, that you as a user can demand the source code of the instance running due to the agpl license.
- bobajeff 9y ago
  I like searx myself. To bad I can't get the search suggestions to work in the address bar. Also, I wish there was an app to run it off of your phone. It would be nice to not have to use a public instance.

dingo_bat 9y ago

Will they censor results like EU has been forcing Google to do?

mirimir 9y ago
Based in EU, I can't see how they wouldn't. I don't want censored search.
- ehllo 9y ago
  If you mean the "Right to be Forgotten", you should know that there is a clear difference between censorship and this ruling. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...
C14L 9y ago
You mean, follow the law? Yes. Shocking, isn't it?
- briandear 9y ago
  So people seem to want a privacy-protecting search engine that provides censored results based on the whims of governments. Ok, that is logical. Did a single person in the EU willingly vote for a censored web? Does anyone actually want the government of France Germany or Turkey deciding what websites you are allowed to visit? Why not put all the servers in a location that actually respects freedom and not censor anything AND not track us? That would be something I would be interested in. The whole concept of geo-restricted anything is a ridiculous antithesis to what the internet is supposed to be.
  - jcbrand 9y ago
    Turkey is not part of the EU.

ACow_Adonis 9y ago

I actually like its theme stylistically more than I like DDG. A couple of points of feedback though: - When I go through the lite version (which should almost be the default), if I image search, clicking on the results takes me to the webpage that the image is on, not the image itself. If i wanted that I wouldn't be doing an image search. - There's an "install qwant" button in the top right hand of the screen. I'm not clear what i'd be installing if i clicked on that, or why i should need or want to install anything to use a search engine? - I've gotten two separate front-pages when visiting www.qwant.com on desktop. One is a semi-minimalist page, a bit more complicated than the lite version, but quite nice and clean. If this was the default i'd be happy. The second was a version more reminiscent of the old "yahoo" type setup, with news and stories and random stuff splattered everywhere below the search bar. Subjectively, the second one needs to die. However, i'm not sure why its no longer turning up for me (even though I'm glad it isn't). I certainly haven't saved my account, nor am i consciously using a remembered URL. - I got a captcha type thing popping up saying there'd been a lot of activity from my location. I'm pretty sure I'm not currently behind my VPN, so that seemed weird for me to be seeing such... - On mobile, that just took WAY too long to open. Almost 10 seconds. As others have mentioned, you need to eliminate half the crap and make the rest more responsive. I don't go to search engine to view tabloid stories (or if i did, i'd search for them), i'm there to search. - Its not entirely clear why it seems that the links on the lite page are redirects, but the links on the main page appear to be direct? Is that deliberate? A bug? Obviously one would prefer them all to be direct. - Don't know what's going on, it appeared to me subjectively that the main page was picking up successfully that I was from Australia. However, during one of my searches using the lite page, the options up the top of "web, news, social", etc looked like they were in another language (looked dutch-ish to me).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Zhenya 9y ago

Won't even load the search input field without javascript...

fulafel 9y ago

How is the privacy assurance of this vs DDG? What are the promises and does either proide more than promises?

georgeglue1 9y ago

many privacy search engines like duckduckgo really just query bing or google (sometimes through a proxy)... any idea if qwant does this?

infbtag 9y ago
https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-the-web/ https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-th... Although they just show Bing results for me so don't know how much of their own index is actually used.
- cJ0th 9y ago
  It seems to depend on your location. > In March 2017, news articles revealed Qwant displays mainly search results from Bing, except in France and Germany, despite several commitment to be exclusively "made in France". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism
kbwt 9y ago
Yeah, for the queries I tested with it returned the exact same results as Yahoo (which in turn gets its results from Bing). The auto-completions are also very limited, no long tail suggestions at all. They also seem to use Elasticsearch from looking at their job postings, but mostly the focus for hiring seems to be on front-end and scripting.

lawl 9y ago

European here. First of all, this is okay. But not good. I've tried several "slang" searches that google gets just fine. I've tried these because ddg had/has problems with them for a long time. E.g. If I google for "poe shavs" (a slang term for an item with an abbreviation of the game name), I expect https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings from what I've tried this seems to work even without a search history on google. I've tried this across different cookieless browsers and IP's. Google just seems to get it. This seems to return (almost) the exact same shit as bing on Qwant. So I do not see how this is an improvement over bing/ddg/whatever. Man I'd love to get rid of google in my personal life, but... for my searches nobody else seems to perform. Google just seems to know what I want to search, even if I don't have a search history on that machine. Edit: For searches in german it seems to perform similarily shitty to bing. Do they get search results from bing?

fstephany 9y ago
I feel like Qwant works much better in french than english.
- ehllo 9y ago
  I think qwant is a company from france.
Iv 9y ago
The thing is, Google improves its results THANKS to its privacy invasion. To understand "poe" as path of exile, it helps to know that you at least once searched for path of exile. After it has seen a few hundreds users do that, it will make the connection. To know that "poe shavs" refers to the game and not Edgar Alan Poe, it probably had to provide a link to a relevant author's name and to the game's page and watch which links people would more likely click. There is a chicken and egg here. People want a search engine that can read their minds without invading their privacy, that's a hard problem.
- nottorp 9y ago

Marc66FR 9y ago

Been using qwant since it came out and I never looked back: great UI and search results

Symbiote 9y ago

Filtering by page language would be useful. Half of my results for a search query of a scientific term were the Wikipedia pages in other languages.

kakarot 9y ago

The main thing I like about this service is the looks. It's mostly sleek and refreshingly minimal with a colorful and expressive logo to boot, a la Google. DDG on the other hand... while I love the idea and would love to use it more often, not only gives poor results for most of my searches but the heavy use of red literally gives me a physical anxiety that makes it basically unusable. I could style the page myself but they really need to consider losing the red in favor of green or purple or gold because I can't be the only one who experiences this.

sewer_bird 9y ago
DGG has about as much red on it as Hacker News: is it such a heavy use of color? At least on desktop in Safari, the site is pretty 'white', and I'm surprised you get literal physical anxiety.
- kakarot 9y ago
  Interesting! Last time I used the service, about 3-4 months ago, the search results page was awash in red. Now it seems that the style has been much improved to the point of usability. I don't get anxiety like before. FWIW I was/am using Firefox on both Fedora and Windows. How long has DDG had its current look for you?
  - sewer_bird 9y ago
    I think I switched to DDG perhaps 5 months ago, although I'm not sure. Happy ducking, hah!

pjmlp 9y ago

> https://about.qwant.com/job/ninja/ https://about.qwant.com/job/ninja/ What a disappointment, I was expecting some job requirements regarding the handling of shuriken, nunchakus, sword fighting, art of camouflage, ... Ah, and something like the graduation note of Shaolin Temple, in case of attendance.

MichaelMoser123 9y ago

How does qwant pays it bills? How do you do business? I didn't see any advertising, and there are no paid subscriptions, is the project funded by the EU?

captainmuon 9y ago
This is an important question, I was wondering the same for very long with DDG. The answer seems to be ads, like everybody else: https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-money/ https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-mon...
- vagnes 9y ago
  They say: "When you use Qwant, no personal information whatsoever is neither captured or transmitted to advertisers.", but then they also say: "We believe we now have designed a simple and efficient offering by working with the Microsoft Bing ad network." Is it just me, or are these two statements oxymorons?
  - captainmuon 9y ago
    They probably say "give me some ads for keyword 'react js'" and don't pass on your IP or other identifying info. Still a problem if you search for your own name, but I don't think you can do much about that. Or maybe MS provides a bloom table / index of all keywords they currenty have ads for, so you can check "offline" before sending it to them?
johansch 9y ago
> is the project funded by the EU? Yes. The EIB "loaned" them 25 million Euro: http://www.eib.org/infocentre/press/releases/all/2015/2015-243-eib-provides-eur-25-million-for-start-up-qwant.htm http://www.eib.org/infocentre/press/releases/all/2015/2015-2...

5kyn3t 9y ago

I think it is great news. Europe is so much behind the US in the IT-Sector. Even russia has a successful search-engine. The default view is a bit overloaded in my opinion... Lite version: https://lite.qwant.com/ https://lite.qwant.com/ A plus point is that qwant also supports hashbangs like duckduckgo.

itronitron 9y ago
looks promising, qwanting 'java concurrency' gives a nice set of relevant results
- DCRichards 9y ago
  I hope that one day when Qwant is big, this is cited as the first use of 'qwanting'
Annatar 9y ago
Europe is so much behind the US in the IT-Sector. Isn’t that a sad truth, only made worse by the irony that a lot of us went to work in the States. A lot of Europe is still conceptually stuck in the pre-UNIX, lone desktop Windows/MS-DOS, early ’90’s era, while the rest of the world runs them by with macOS PC’s and iPads. Lots of European UNIX talent left for the States right at the cusp of the dot-com era and helped build the Internet because that’s where all the action was. We never really recovered from that.
- jjkk0101 9y ago
  I am based in Copenhagen and can see some innovation at the application level but there is a lot of catch-up as well, mostly focused at the nordics internal market. For lower levels of the stack (e.g.: IaaS), there is no way to be competitive against SV without subsidy b/c fwcit there is no access to capital nor enough talents to this problem size. The prospective is not getting any better at the immigration level, the greencard schema has been repelled and companies are having even harder time to attract talent.
- everyone 9y ago

mfukar 9y ago

I might try it again sometime in the future, when it doesn't take more than 5 seconds to get a result to a query.

a_imho 9y ago

I never understand log in on a search engine. I'm supplying keywords to search for, please don't try to profile and put me in a bubble. After like 2 searches I got: A high amount of connections have been detected from your location and you have been blocked.Please, validate the anti-robot below to be allowed access to the website.

5kyn3t 9y ago
I got the same notification

m12k 9y ago

I don't want privacy to be a parameter that companies compete on, I want to government to enforce something sane that all the companies will then have to follow. Imagine if there were '50% less lead than our competitors' labels on food products.

jk2323 9y ago

Do they run their own crawling server or do they "repack" search request to google like DDG, Startpage or ixquick? If they do it from scratch, kudos.

Nux 9y ago

Privacy loving European here. I want to like it, but it gives off a bad vibe. First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. Give me a text field, I don't care about the news. Second, no easy way to add it in my Firefox search engine list. This is really something obvious they should fix, come on. Third, they want you to install an extension that will indeed set qwant as default search engine, but also seems to try to shove down your throat some sort of bookmark and "board" (their own thing, pinterest like?) management which requires login to their service. http://img.nux.ro/q9M-Menu_292.png http://img.nux.ro/q9M-Menu_292.png IMHO it doesn't really live up to the expectations and it seems more like a social media experiment attempt. If we forego the whole privacy thing which I think they are only using for marketing here, then the search results don't seem too bad (in my 2 minutes of testing) and the boards thing is interesting, but nah.

AlexAffe 9y ago
Adding to that: they advertise the app for android. The app wants access to contacts, identity, all available networks (wifi scans) and a bunch of other stuff, where I ask myself why it is needed. I also want(ed) to like it, but you are exactly right about that bad vibe. We finally need a search engine that just costs a monthly fee or gets paid via coinhive or the like....
myf01d 9y ago
> First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. Give me a text field, I don't care about the news. I genuinely don't understand this hostile statement. Why do you complain that a website isn't functional in pure html in 2017? do you want the web to look like it's 1998?
- mrweasel 9y ago
  Why is it a problem to have page functional without Javascript? It's the number one tools for spying on users, so especially if you're a privacy focused search engine, you should except people to have Javascript disabled, until they choose to trust you. There's no real need to javascript on search engines or news sites. There might be some additional features, like polls that will require Javascript, but the base functionality should work. I'm still a firm believer in progressive enhancement, even if it's no longer trendy. Modern Javascript framework however seems to be firmly in the "Javascript or die" camp.

Faaak 9y ago

Sadly, the search engine reports many duplicate results. For example, I searched: "arid land reforestation", and results were (https://screenshots.firefox.com/wl6JuVa5sbWNgy2o/www.qwant.com https://screenshots.firefox.com/wl6JuVa5sbWNgy2o/www.qwant.c...): * 1st: http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... * 2nd: http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... * 4th: http://maestron.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://maestron.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... * 5th: http://pipcoins.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf http://pipcoins.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid... etc, etc. All of which were "bad" websites. It's a shame because some good results (science direct, …) were inside the lot. The content isn't even a pdf. You should implement a "unique" webpage result fingerprint in order to avoid showing duplicates (well, I suppose it's easier said than done..).

dna_polymerase 9y ago

I just did 3 searches on there and 2 times I got a server error. I will try Qwant now as default, but it already feels bad.

leke 9y ago

Looks promising, but my initial searching for Dart lang didn't return any results in News and Social, and unrelated images in the Images search.

throw2016 9y ago

Too busy design wise at the moment and lacking back end details but the results seem decent at first glance. No one can deny competition in search is desperately needed. Without that Google inevitably becomes more emboldened and seeks to further normalize and expand their creepy behavior. An approach for a new engine should be both privacy which is a strong message that will resonate and also the technical details so people don't just assume its consuming another backend. That's what will make it interesting.

slezyr 9y ago

Not sure how it "social" search works, but it gives me a bunch russian bots, when I search "ukraine" https://www.qwant.com/?q=%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0&t=all https://www.qwant.com/?q=%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%B...

gator-io 9y ago

We track usage share of search engines. We do not have Qwant detection at this point, but what I can see: - Out of 7972 sites, 561 have received at least one referral from Qwant. We will need to explore this further to get usable numbers.