11 ms·

Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

133 points by Mizza 6y ago

Mizza 6y ago
This was posted in another thread, but I'd never seen it before. French-made. Results seem just as good as Google, PutLocker searchers work, and it's as privacy-respecting as DDG. I've been using it all day and I'm happy with the results, so I thought I'd share.
- helph67 6y ago
  I have been using it for many months and prefer it to DDG. Haven't used Goo in years!
- LunaSea 6y ago
  It's just a front for Bing. The company is pure hype, no results.
  - jstr 6y ago
    lol you're right. The results are identical.
    - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
      Searching "python merge dict", I would consider the correct answer this StackOverflow post (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-do-i-merge-two-dictionaries-in-a-single-expression-in-python-taking-union-o https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-do-i-merge-two...). Qwant puts it second. Bing places it very near the bottom of the page.
  - 1996 6y ago
    It's a bit more than just hype: it's rebranding Bing results to make them more palatable to a EU audience, while guzzling on public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather support from nationalists. There are actual results - as a public subsidies scam!
    - quibbler 6y ago
      Are they the ones who received one billion eur from the EU? Holy cow...
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      >while guzzling on public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather support from nationalists. This seems like a weird accusation given that government VC arms like In-Q-Tel or institutions like DARPA invest heavily in Silicon Valley tech firms, not to mention that the national science foundation supported the development of pagerank itself[1]. One of Apple's first investors was the Small Business Investment Company, an investment arm of the federal government. The EU would be stupid to not support the development of an independent technology sector. [1]https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660
  - sct202 6y ago
    Someone should make a Medium post about how to make your own privacy focused search engine using Bing's API.
- maverick74 6y ago
  I have a better one: https://infinitySearch.Co https://infinitySearch.Co It's Open-source, it's a search engine (they have their own crawler and their own index) and it's private!!!
  - schoen 6y ago
    The slashes after the colon should be forward slashes (/) rather than backslashes (\).
    - maverick74 6y ago
      WT...?! How the did I do that?!?! I mean: I've developed websites... What the was in my head?! LOL THANKS for not letting me look like a dumb for too much long
  - 3np 6y ago
    Looking at their repos, it seems it’s mostly metasearch. Only crawler I see is specifically for news. I’d be curious to hear if anyone self hosted this and searx and how they compare.
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      I self-host SearX, and so can you. Its fairly easy with Docker [1]. However via self-hosting you don't get the anonymity benefits from their upstream (Bing, Yandex, whatever else you enable) which you do get via a public SearX. But with a public SearX instance you don't get the privacy benefits from that instance (ie. all searches can be traced to you). So I end up using both public and self-hosted SearX, DDG, and Google as last resort. [1] https://github.com/searx/searx-docker https://github.com/searx/searx-docker
      - 3np 6y ago
        Yeah, it's already on my bucket list, asking because Qwant looks self-hostable as well :) Still some privacy benefits in not having physical location tied to searches, and an instance can be shared with friends and family.
- notsgnik 6y ago
  not really... https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png
leahshule56 6y ago
I'm getting zero results under web for common search terms on brave mobile. Making this engine entirely useless to me...
shirakawasuna 6y ago
I'm not sure there is a way to create a search engine that can verifiably respect your privacy unless you were to self-host the entire thing. This one's hosted in France. France is part of Nine Eyes, among other things.
- rasengan 6y ago
  Private.sh encrypts queries on the client side and routes requests thru proxies to maximize privacy.
  - blindm 6y ago
    Try a live link instead, it helps users out who have to copy and paste the URL: https://private.sh/ https://private.sh/
  - gnufx 6y ago
    Also https://swisscows.com/ https://swisscows.com/
  - shirakawasuna 6y ago
    Looks like an interesting project! It would still need serious audits since it's all browser-based (arbitrary JS could be added at any time and snoop on the results page) and there's a black box element at the point of retrieving results: we're hoping that the search provider is only sending encrypted results back, but I don't see how we have a guarantee that this is the case and that the query and results aren't being logged in various places and cross-referenceable. Basically, we receive an encrypted result, but where is the non-black-box, non-trust-based guarantee that this is the only result seen?
    - rasengan 6y ago
      You can review the JS and it’s results in the console.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  It's not the job of each individual application to do everything. If you want privacy of your web activities, use Tor, which will work for every website. That's the best you can, even though it is not perfect.
bb101 6y ago
I've been generally happy with startpage.com, they seem to mirror Google's results. And it works with dark mode. You don't get the contextual niceties that you get with Google though e.g. results for "70F in C".
- cpv 6y ago
  FYI, startpage seems to be owned by an ad company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577
blindm 6y ago
I've been trying to get search results for months now, and Qwant just fails everytime with a white screen of death. See screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/jUv6vm0 https://imgur.com/a/jUv6vm0 I've even tried with different IPs / VPN connections and it still refuses to show results. Surely I'm not the only user who experiences this?
- blinzy 6y ago
  That also happens to me if I disable javascript (and therefore get their Qwant Lite page). However, it works if you use a non-English language: https://lite.qwant.com/?l=de&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=de&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=en&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=en&q=foobar <-- this won't work (or omitting l=en) https://lite.qwant.com/?l=es&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=es&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=foobar
  - blindm 6y ago
    But why does one have to resort to hacks like this? I want the English version to work. Obviously Qwant have to iron this out, but I've waited months and they haven't even fixed it. It's a huge bug. It's like they just abandoned the project.
    - blinzy 6y ago
      Oh I definitely agree with you, I just found that workaround above because I was really frustrated as I don't see any advantage to having javascript enabled on my searches and was used to not needing it in Google, Duckduckgo, Ecosia, and other search engines...
maltelandwehr 6y ago
Why not use Ecosia instead? Same search results, same - if not better - privacy, and they use their ad revenue to plant trees.
notsgnik 6y ago
first try... disappointed :/ https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png
- blinzy 6y ago
  As I posted on another comment I think that happens because you have disabled Javascript and there seems to be a bug for English. If you use JS (as done for your Google search) it returns results as expected.
  - hadrien01 6y ago
    You can also use Qwant Lite, it's just like the HTML version of DDG: https://lite.qwant.com/ https://lite.qwant.com/ Edit: saw your other message, doesn't work in English because of a bug
crocodiletears 6y ago
At some point, we're going to cut the branding middle-man, and put Bing on the front page of HN as a viable alternative to Google Search. Not as sexy as the high-minded front organizations that reskin it, but it'd be nice if we could be honest with ourselves about the beasts we were feeding.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gnufx 6y ago
  Is that meant to imply that the privacy protection and un-bubbling of the "middle men" is bogus? (I don't know about Qwant, but DDG isn't solely Bing, and it feeds some worthwhile organizations with donations.)
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    I think DDG is more of a legitimate competitor in the search space than other engines running off the Bing index. My understanding is that they've been pretty transparent about using Bing and Yandex as sources for its product, have done quite a bit of work to tailor the results they spit back, and maintain their own knowledge graph for features like instant answers. They seem to function more as a metasearch engine. From ehat I've seen, search engines like Ecosia and Qwant aren't very clear about what they bring to the table, beyond serving as a proxy for Bing that doesn't store as much data on you. I don't think there's anything explicitly wrong with that. But I don't think they really merit anybody's attention either. Especially since they don't explicitly advertise what they are.
    - pythux 6y ago
      Ecosia explicitly specifies "Results from Microsoft" on every results page, so they seem pretty transparent there. I don't think DuckDuckGo and Qwant are as upfront about that.
      - tjomk 6y ago
progre 6y ago
I've been pretty happy with https://www.runnaroo.com/ https://www.runnaroo.com/ for the past months
- Accacin 6y ago
  Yeah I saw that on the front page a few months back, and people seemed impressed with it. Although, I also remember seeing Qwant on the front page, or at least in the comments of another search engine post and people were impressed with it. Seems the tide has turned!
  - progre 6y ago
    What runnaroo seems to do that is working for me is to somehow prioritize programmer type hits. Maybe it's just the stack overflow source. The "skinned" Bing sites seems to localize too hard and prioritize shopping and big-news type hits. What I don't really like about Runnaroo is that it's hard to pin down who's behind it. It's seems to be just the one guy and I can relate to his need for privacy but on the other hand I can't 100% trust the "We don't save or sell your data"-claim when there is no one to hold accountable.
dmacvicar 6y ago
I have tried multiple times to use it, but it takes several seconds to load, vs DuckDuckgo which shows up almost instantly.
justeasy 6y ago
not bad.
tirz 6y ago
I used it for a long time (and 2 years as my main search engine) for 3 reasons... - it is french - it is working in Europa/USA/China (I studied in Paris/San Francisco/Tianjin) - my best friend used to works their. We had some good talks about Qwant, but it will not be relevant for my user review. So here we are: 1. They are not Open-Source (as opposite to Searx). Only the plugins are. Can we trust them when they say to respect our privacy ? 2. They are not TOR friendly. Full of captchaS !!! 3. They have no onion site. DDG have one. 4. They run some kind of weird analytics. Each time we click on a search, the JS code trigger a fetch to `https://api.qwant.com/api/action/url https://api.qwant.com/api/action/url` and include: - our current language - the query we searched - the link we clicked - etc... They were backed by Bing before, is it still the case or are they running their own stats engine? I do not know. If we trigger ourself some false fetches, can we show "twitter" as first result when someone searches for "facebook"? 5. Their lite version is not lite (=/= duckduckgo.com/html/). They redirect all our clicks to be able to run their analytics without the JS's fetch API (proof: `https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=hacker+news&t=web https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=hacker+news&t=web` the first link does not offer `https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com` but `https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1YXtAXz3SH6wFIVw%3D/https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F?position=10&query=hacker%20news&t=web&l=fr https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1...`). Possible attack with `https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1YXtAXz3SH6wFIVw%3D/https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F?position=10&query=GOOGLE%20news&t=web&l=fr https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1...` (see the fake "&query") ? Also, They cannot store the config: go to settings, do whatever you want, do your search, switch tab (go to "news" for example) => your settings are reset to default. You may fix it by adding your settings to the link "&l=fr...". 6. Their front-side is broken. If we visit their site without user-agent, we have an exception in their JS which crash the page (blank page). And their is more. 7. They do not care. I emailed them maybe 5-6 bugs, they never replied nether fixed them. 8. Their API is sometime weird (just because not documented ?). I ran a custom front-end without Qwant's analytics and the minimum working request is: `https://api.qwant.com/api/search/web?q=hackernews&count=10&offset=0&uiv=4&t= https://api.qwant.com/api/search/web?q=hackernews&count=10&o...`. What is "&uiv=4"? Why can't it be null or 0? What is "&t="? Is it really needed? Why is it not needed everywhere? => `https://api.qwant.com/api/suggest?q=duckduck https://api.qwant.com/api/suggest?q=duckduck`. In sum up, in a customer point of view, Qwant is just a frenchy Google hosted mainly in Europa and allowed in China. Nothing new here, I recommend to stick to DDG for the moment. Edit: fix minor typo + add proof for QwantLite analytics
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Some obvious differences... Bing sets cookies. Qwant does not set cookies. Qwant, i.e., lite.qwant.com, prefixes search result URLs to point to Qwant servers. Qwant redirects www.qwant.com to lite.qwant.com when Javascript is disabled. Bing does not prefix search results. Bing requires sign-up in order to use their API. Qwant's undocumented API is freely accessible, no sign-up. Qwant, i.e., lite.qwant.com, requires a User-Agent header. Bing does not require a UA header. Example of Qwant API curl "https://api.qwant.com/api/search/videos?q=example&count=150&offset=0&f=xyz&t=xyz&l=en_gb&uiv=xyz"
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Speaking as someone who ran operations in a search company that had an api for accessing their search results, that api will get slammed. But not in a good way. Crooks use search engines to find pages that have exploitable js code or sql injection vulnerabilities. They use them to find unprotected comment sections so they can inject spam into them. They use them to build dossiers on people by scraping public information sites. And all that API use, they never pay a dime for access. Nor will they reveal who they are in order to get access. It just isn't how they operate. At its peak I had over 2.6 MILLION internet hosts black listed from using the Blekko API. Exactly zero reached out to any of the easily found contact addresses and said "Hey your API seems to be unresponsive" :-)
  - BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
    Can't this be remedied by introducing a 1 second cooloff period per IP address?
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      Query per second or qps limits is a good start, but I quickly learned that a 1qps limit to "free" access meant that all of a sudden it was a 1000 unique IPs that were making one request each. Lots of botnets were highlighted this way, when one address searches for 'joomla v2.3', and the next IP searches for 'joomla v2.3', page=2, and the next IP searches for 'joomla v2.3', page=3, etc. It was annoying but an interesting problem. We could implement any arbitrary policy and then watch as the bots adjusted to come in just at that policy limit. We banned entire Ukrainian ISPs (they were a big source at the time) and have VPN providers become the big users. We put in limits per day, I tried a "thermal" system where IPs gained "heat" by queries and "cooled" by idle time. We built a server with a "broken" IP stack that we could send the initial TCP connect to, the server would accept the connection and then never respond. A "black hole" if you will. The trick was we didn't actually keep[ sockets open we just pretended like we it was the other end of a TCP connection. It did everything correctly except complete the connection. That would cause any client using off the shelf IP stacks to hang indefinitely. It is a game with no ending as one might say.
oftenwrong 6y ago
Not to be confused with https://www.qwantz.com/ https://www.qwantz.com/
jostmey 6y ago
I use the putlocker test to determine if/when a search engine ceases to provide useful results. If a search for putlocker only yields .com domains and the like, it no is longer prioritizing the most useful results. Google long ago stopped returning useful results for my academic research. For example, it never returns Wikipedia articles unless I explicitly use Wikipedia as a keyword, which I now have to do for most of my searchers.
- Google234 6y ago
  Use google scholar for academic search... Wikipedia comes up most of the time for me
Maer4everever 6y ago
https://www.developpez.com/actu/303643/Qwant-le-faux-espoir-de-la-French-Tech-Le-moteur-de-recherche-souverain-mais-dependant-a-plus-de-60-pourcent-de-Bing-est-au-coeur-d-un-scandale-d-Etat/#:~:text=Est%20au%20coeur%20d'un%20scandale%20d'%C3%89tat,-Le%202020%2D05&text=Qwant%2C%20le%20moteur%20de%20recherche,am%C3%A9ricains%20de%20la%20Silicon%20Valley https://www.developpez.com/actu/303643/Qwant-le-faux-espoir-....
jascii 6y ago
In our (US) current political climate I can't help but cringe a bit at the prominent use of the letter Q and the claim of privacy. I doubt there is a relation with the conspiracy theory group, but the marketing seems a bit awkward.
- quesera 6y ago
  Q is a perfectly good letter. Don't surrender it to the creeps.
- dasKrokodil 6y ago
  I think Qwant predates the Q-phenomenon becoming mainstream by several years. Other than that, I agree with the other answer – Q is a perfectly good letter and we shouldn't let them steal it from us.
brundolf 6y ago
Maybe this is naive, but I don't understand what Google's impenetrable moat is around search. It's a hard technical problem, but not one with a concrete barrier to entry. And there are lots of really smart people solving really hard technical problems out in the open. On top of that, much of the recent progress in AI is open-source. Surely that could help? I guess indexing at that scale takes a lot of hardware. This is the most plausible barrier that I can see, but it still doesn't seem insurmountable. What if you rethought what a search engine is? Does it really have to cover all of the text on every page on the internet? Could it be more focused? This just seems like a solvable problem once there are enough smart, motivated people. Which there appear to be.
- pythux 6y ago
  The main barrier to enter the search market is not tech, it's money: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-one-click-and-27-billion-us-dollars-away.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-... And of course there are lots of other issues. For example the Web is very hostile when you are not Google Bot (i.e. there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing).
  - brundolf 6y ago
    The money mentioned in that article is about being the default search engine, not being a functional one. Basically the question I'm asking is why DDG has to outsource to Bing. > there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing If you're talking about robots.txt, that's just a suggestion. It doesn't hold any actual preventative power.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      IP blocking and rate limiting for clients outside the blessed range operated by G
- jonas21 6y ago
  Indexing isn't the hard part. Ranking is. For any given query, there are probably millions of web pages that match. How do you pick the best ones to show the user? How do you do that even when most people are really bad at expressing what they want? Even if all websites were acting in good faith, this would be a really hard problem. Now add in the fact that there's an $80 billion industry devoted to gaming search results, and it suddenly becomes much harder. Would it be impossible to build a search engine as good as Google? No. But you could very well spend billions of dollars to match or even slightly surpass Google's performance and still lose. Why? Because unless it's clear and obvious that you're superior to Google, people are still going to use Google because that's what they're used to. That's why the smart players in the space like DDG aren't competing head-to-head in search, and are instead focusing on areas, like privacy, where Google can't compete. As for the others, I suggest you try Googling "cuil" some time.
hyperfekt 6y ago
There is a vast number of search engines that are not Google, many of whom 'respect privacy' in some way. That does not make them noteworthy. None I've encountered so far are actually good enough to compete. This one doesn't seem any different.
afrojack123 6y ago
This is antitrust shenanigans. Google takes a loss on many of its products just to avoid antitrust. The big tech companies are an oligarchy. Move on.
Jyaif 6y ago
Paid for by the french taxpayers, which unfortunately includes me.
known 6y ago
I think Google is doing Page ranking + URL tracking; When I search for Trump it will dynamically stack up the URL based on the clicks it gets;
0x00101010 6y ago
Qwant is Springer. Springer is the company that tries to blackmail google and all others by lobbying into EU law (article 17, former 13) fighting a free and open internet. I don't know which is worse. Springer is the german Apple in terms of privacy.
janandonly 6y ago
My nextDNS blocks Qwant for some reason.... anyone an idea as to why?
AmazingTurtle 6y ago
yet another one. duck duck go? meeeen
totaldude87 6y ago
i tried a simple search - what is a tiered storage - https://www.qwant.com/?q=what%20is%20storage%20tiering&t=web https://www.qwant.com/?q=what%20is%20storage%20tiering&t=web top 5 are ads, nothing relevant :(
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
Google doesn't work for me anyway because Google blocks VPNs (interferes with its spying I guess), but latest Firefox has a nice feature where you can conveniently select where your search goes to. So now 50% of my searches go directly to wikipedia without any middle-man, russian queries go to yandex, and the rest go to qwant, and if this doesn't work - to startpage, which feeds from google.
andysch 6y ago
Discovered Qwant through iodéOS, a pretty good privacy oriented mobile OS. I used to use ddgo but qwant is not so bad

133 points by Mizza 6y ago

This was posted in another thread, but I'd never seen it before. French-made. Results seem just as good as Google, PutLocker searchers work, and it's as privacy-respecting as DDG. I've been using it all day and I'm happy with the results, so I thought I'd share.

helph67 6y ago
I have been using it for many months and prefer it to DDG. Haven't used Goo in years!
LunaSea 6y ago
It's just a front for Bing. The company is pure hype, no results.
- jstr 6y ago
  lol you're right. The results are identical.
  - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
    Searching "python merge dict", I would consider the correct answer this StackOverflow post (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-do-i-merge-two-dictionaries-in-a-single-expression-in-python-taking-union-o https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-do-i-merge-two...). Qwant puts it second. Bing places it very near the bottom of the page.
- 1996 6y ago
  It's a bit more than just hype: it's rebranding Bing results to make them more palatable to a EU audience, while guzzling on public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather support from nationalists. There are actual results - as a public subsidies scam!
  - quibbler 6y ago
    Are they the ones who received one billion eur from the EU? Holy cow...
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >while guzzling on public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather support from nationalists. This seems like a weird accusation given that government VC arms like In-Q-Tel or institutions like DARPA invest heavily in Silicon Valley tech firms, not to mention that the national science foundation supported the development of pagerank itself[1]. One of Apple's first investors was the Small Business Investment Company, an investment arm of the federal government. The EU would be stupid to not support the development of an independent technology sector. [1]https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660
- sct202 6y ago
  Someone should make a Medium post about how to make your own privacy focused search engine using Bing's API.
maverick74 6y ago
I have a better one: https://infinitySearch.Co https://infinitySearch.Co It's Open-source, it's a search engine (they have their own crawler and their own index) and it's private!!!
- schoen 6y ago
  The slashes after the colon should be forward slashes (/) rather than backslashes (\).
  - maverick74 6y ago
    WT...?! How the did I do that?!?! I mean: I've developed websites... What the was in my head?! LOL THANKS for not letting me look like a dumb for too much long
- 3np 6y ago
  Looking at their repos, it seems it’s mostly metasearch. Only crawler I see is specifically for news. I’d be curious to hear if anyone self hosted this and searx and how they compare.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    I self-host SearX, and so can you. Its fairly easy with Docker [1]. However via self-hosting you don't get the anonymity benefits from their upstream (Bing, Yandex, whatever else you enable) which you do get via a public SearX. But with a public SearX instance you don't get the privacy benefits from that instance (ie. all searches can be traced to you). So I end up using both public and self-hosted SearX, DDG, and Google as last resort. [1] https://github.com/searx/searx-docker https://github.com/searx/searx-docker
    - 3np 6y ago
      Yeah, it's already on my bucket list, asking because Qwant looks self-hostable as well :) Still some privacy benefits in not having physical location tied to searches, and an instance can be shared with friends and family.
notsgnik 6y ago
not really... https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png

leahshule56 6y ago

I'm getting zero results under web for common search terms on brave mobile. Making this engine entirely useless to me...

shirakawasuna 6y ago

I'm not sure there is a way to create a search engine that can verifiably respect your privacy unless you were to self-host the entire thing. This one's hosted in France. France is part of Nine Eyes, among other things.

rasengan 6y ago
Private.sh encrypts queries on the client side and routes requests thru proxies to maximize privacy.
- blindm 6y ago
  Try a live link instead, it helps users out who have to copy and paste the URL: https://private.sh/ https://private.sh/
- gnufx 6y ago
  Also https://swisscows.com/ https://swisscows.com/
- shirakawasuna 6y ago
  Looks like an interesting project! It would still need serious audits since it's all browser-based (arbitrary JS could be added at any time and snoop on the results page) and there's a black box element at the point of retrieving results: we're hoping that the search provider is only sending encrypted results back, but I don't see how we have a guarantee that this is the case and that the query and results aren't being logged in various places and cross-referenceable. Basically, we receive an encrypted result, but where is the non-black-box, non-trust-based guarantee that this is the only result seen?
  - rasengan 6y ago
    You can review the JS and it’s results in the console.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
It's not the job of each individual application to do everything. If you want privacy of your web activities, use Tor, which will work for every website. That's the best you can, even though it is not perfect.

bb101 6y ago

I've been generally happy with startpage.com, they seem to mirror Google's results. And it works with dark mode. You don't get the contextual niceties that you get with Google though e.g. results for "70F in C".

cpv 6y ago
FYI, startpage seems to be owned by an ad company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

blindm 6y ago

I've been trying to get search results for months now, and Qwant just fails everytime with a white screen of death. See screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/jUv6vm0 https://imgur.com/a/jUv6vm0 I've even tried with different IPs / VPN connections and it still refuses to show results. Surely I'm not the only user who experiences this?

blinzy 6y ago
That also happens to me if I disable javascript (and therefore get their Qwant Lite page). However, it works if you use a non-English language: https://lite.qwant.com/?l=de&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=de&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=en&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=en&q=foobar <-- this won't work (or omitting l=en) https://lite.qwant.com/?l=es&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=es&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=foobar
- blindm 6y ago
  But why does one have to resort to hacks like this? I want the English version to work. Obviously Qwant have to iron this out, but I've waited months and they haven't even fixed it. It's a huge bug. It's like they just abandoned the project.
  - blinzy 6y ago
    Oh I definitely agree with you, I just found that workaround above because I was really frustrated as I don't see any advantage to having javascript enabled on my searches and was used to not needing it in Google, Duckduckgo, Ecosia, and other search engines...

maltelandwehr 6y ago

Why not use Ecosia instead? Same search results, same - if not better - privacy, and they use their ad revenue to plant trees.

notsgnik 6y ago

first try... disappointed :/ https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png

blinzy 6y ago
As I posted on another comment I think that happens because you have disabled Javascript and there seems to be a bug for English. If you use JS (as done for your Google search) it returns results as expected.
- hadrien01 6y ago
  You can also use Qwant Lite, it's just like the HTML version of DDG: https://lite.qwant.com/ https://lite.qwant.com/ Edit: saw your other message, doesn't work in English because of a bug

crocodiletears 6y ago

At some point, we're going to cut the branding middle-man, and put Bing on the front page of HN as a viable alternative to Google Search. Not as sexy as the high-minded front organizations that reskin it, but it'd be nice if we could be honest with ourselves about the beasts we were feeding.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gnufx 6y ago
Is that meant to imply that the privacy protection and un-bubbling of the "middle men" is bogus? (I don't know about Qwant, but DDG isn't solely Bing, and it feeds some worthwhile organizations with donations.)
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  I think DDG is more of a legitimate competitor in the search space than other engines running off the Bing index. My understanding is that they've been pretty transparent about using Bing and Yandex as sources for its product, have done quite a bit of work to tailor the results they spit back, and maintain their own knowledge graph for features like instant answers. They seem to function more as a metasearch engine. From ehat I've seen, search engines like Ecosia and Qwant aren't very clear about what they bring to the table, beyond serving as a proxy for Bing that doesn't store as much data on you. I don't think there's anything explicitly wrong with that. But I don't think they really merit anybody's attention either. Especially since they don't explicitly advertise what they are.
  - pythux 6y ago
    Ecosia explicitly specifies "Results from Microsoft" on every results page, so they seem pretty transparent there. I don't think DuckDuckGo and Qwant are as upfront about that.
    - tjomk 6y ago

progre 6y ago

I've been pretty happy with https://www.runnaroo.com/ https://www.runnaroo.com/ for the past months

Accacin 6y ago
Yeah I saw that on the front page a few months back, and people seemed impressed with it. Although, I also remember seeing Qwant on the front page, or at least in the comments of another search engine post and people were impressed with it. Seems the tide has turned!
- progre 6y ago
  What runnaroo seems to do that is working for me is to somehow prioritize programmer type hits. Maybe it's just the stack overflow source. The "skinned" Bing sites seems to localize too hard and prioritize shopping and big-news type hits. What I don't really like about Runnaroo is that it's hard to pin down who's behind it. It's seems to be just the one guy and I can relate to his need for privacy but on the other hand I can't 100% trust the "We don't save or sell your data"-claim when there is no one to hold accountable.

dmacvicar 6y ago

I have tried multiple times to use it, but it takes several seconds to load, vs DuckDuckgo which shows up almost instantly.

justeasy 6y ago

not bad.

tirz 6y ago

I used it for a long time (and 2 years as my main search engine) for 3 reasons... - it is french - it is working in Europa/USA/China (I studied in Paris/San Francisco/Tianjin) - my best friend used to works their. We had some good talks about Qwant, but it will not be relevant for my user review. So here we are: 1. They are not Open-Source (as opposite to Searx). Only the plugins are. Can we trust them when they say to respect our privacy ? 2. They are not TOR friendly. Full of captchaS !!! 3. They have no onion site. DDG have one. 4. They run some kind of weird analytics. Each time we click on a search, the JS code trigger a fetch to `https://api.qwant.com/api/action/url https://api.qwant.com/api/action/url` and include: - our current language - the query we searched - the link we clicked - etc... They were backed by Bing before, is it still the case or are they running their own stats engine? I do not know. If we trigger ourself some false fetches, can we show "twitter" as first result when someone searches for "facebook"? 5. Their lite version is not lite (=/= duckduckgo.com/html/). They redirect all our clicks to be able to run their analytics without the JS's fetch API (proof: `https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=hacker+news&t=web https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=hacker+news&t=web` the first link does not offer `https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com` but `https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1YXtAXz3SH6wFIVw%3D/https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F?position=10&query=hacker%20news&t=web&l=fr https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1...`). Possible attack with `https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1YXtAXz3SH6wFIVw%3D/https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F?position=10&query=GOOGLE%20news&t=web&l=fr https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/yFOdE8r1P1LTSLsA9IIBNKaZmDF1...` (see the fake "&query") ? Also, They cannot store the config: go to settings, do whatever you want, do your search, switch tab (go to "news" for example) => your settings are reset to default. You may fix it by adding your settings to the link "&l=fr...". 6. Their front-side is broken. If we visit their site without user-agent, we have an exception in their JS which crash the page (blank page). And their is more. 7. They do not care. I emailed them maybe 5-6 bugs, they never replied nether fixed them. 8. Their API is sometime weird (just because not documented ?). I ran a custom front-end without Qwant's analytics and the minimum working request is: `https://api.qwant.com/api/search/web?q=hackernews&count=10&offset=0&uiv=4&t= https://api.qwant.com/api/search/web?q=hackernews&count=10&o...`. What is "&uiv=4"? Why can't it be null or 0? What is "&t="? Is it really needed? Why is it not needed everywhere? => `https://api.qwant.com/api/suggest?q=duckduck https://api.qwant.com/api/suggest?q=duckduck`. In sum up, in a customer point of view, Qwant is just a frenchy Google hosted mainly in Europa and allowed in China. Nothing new here, I recommend to stick to DDG for the moment. Edit: fix minor typo + add proof for QwantLite analytics

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Some obvious differences... Bing sets cookies. Qwant does not set cookies. Qwant, i.e., lite.qwant.com, prefixes search result URLs to point to Qwant servers. Qwant redirects www.qwant.com to lite.qwant.com when Javascript is disabled. Bing does not prefix search results. Bing requires sign-up in order to use their API. Qwant's undocumented API is freely accessible, no sign-up. Qwant, i.e., lite.qwant.com, requires a User-Agent header. Bing does not require a UA header. Example of Qwant API curl "https://api.qwant.com/api/search/videos?q=example&count=150&offset=0&f=xyz&t=xyz&l=en_gb&uiv=xyz"

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Speaking as someone who ran operations in a search company that had an api for accessing their search results, that api will get slammed. But not in a good way. Crooks use search engines to find pages that have exploitable js code or sql injection vulnerabilities. They use them to find unprotected comment sections so they can inject spam into them. They use them to build dossiers on people by scraping public information sites. And all that API use, they never pay a dime for access. Nor will they reveal who they are in order to get access. It just isn't how they operate. At its peak I had over 2.6 MILLION internet hosts black listed from using the Blekko API. Exactly zero reached out to any of the easily found contact addresses and said "Hey your API seems to be unresponsive" :-)
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
  Can't this be remedied by introducing a 1 second cooloff period per IP address?
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Query per second or qps limits is a good start, but I quickly learned that a 1qps limit to "free" access meant that all of a sudden it was a 1000 unique IPs that were making one request each. Lots of botnets were highlighted this way, when one address searches for 'joomla v2.3', and the next IP searches for 'joomla v2.3', page=2, and the next IP searches for 'joomla v2.3', page=3, etc. It was annoying but an interesting problem. We could implement any arbitrary policy and then watch as the bots adjusted to come in just at that policy limit. We banned entire Ukrainian ISPs (they were a big source at the time) and have VPN providers become the big users. We put in limits per day, I tried a "thermal" system where IPs gained "heat" by queries and "cooled" by idle time. We built a server with a "broken" IP stack that we could send the initial TCP connect to, the server would accept the connection and then never respond. A "black hole" if you will. The trick was we didn't actually keep[ sockets open we just pretended like we it was the other end of a TCP connection. It did everything correctly except complete the connection. That would cause any client using off the shelf IP stacks to hang indefinitely. It is a game with no ending as one might say.

oftenwrong 6y ago

Not to be confused with https://www.qwantz.com/ https://www.qwantz.com/

jostmey 6y ago

I use the putlocker test to determine if/when a search engine ceases to provide useful results. If a search for putlocker only yields .com domains and the like, it no is longer prioritizing the most useful results. Google long ago stopped returning useful results for my academic research. For example, it never returns Wikipedia articles unless I explicitly use Wikipedia as a keyword, which I now have to do for most of my searchers.

Google234 6y ago
Use google scholar for academic search... Wikipedia comes up most of the time for me

Maer4everever 6y ago

https://www.developpez.com/actu/303643/Qwant-le-faux-espoir-de-la-French-Tech-Le-moteur-de-recherche-souverain-mais-dependant-a-plus-de-60-pourcent-de-Bing-est-au-coeur-d-un-scandale-d-Etat/#:~:text=Est%20au%20coeur%20d'un%20scandale%20d'%C3%89tat,-Le%202020%2D05&text=Qwant%2C%20le%20moteur%20de%20recherche,am%C3%A9ricains%20de%20la%20Silicon%20Valley https://www.developpez.com/actu/303643/Qwant-le-faux-espoir-....

jascii 6y ago

In our (US) current political climate I can't help but cringe a bit at the prominent use of the letter Q and the claim of privacy. I doubt there is a relation with the conspiracy theory group, but the marketing seems a bit awkward.

quesera 6y ago
Q is a perfectly good letter. Don't surrender it to the creeps.
dasKrokodil 6y ago
I think Qwant predates the Q-phenomenon becoming mainstream by several years. Other than that, I agree with the other answer – Q is a perfectly good letter and we shouldn't let them steal it from us.

brundolf 6y ago

Maybe this is naive, but I don't understand what Google's impenetrable moat is around search. It's a hard technical problem, but not one with a concrete barrier to entry. And there are lots of really smart people solving really hard technical problems out in the open. On top of that, much of the recent progress in AI is open-source. Surely that could help? I guess indexing at that scale takes a lot of hardware. This is the most plausible barrier that I can see, but it still doesn't seem insurmountable. What if you rethought what a search engine is? Does it really have to cover all of the text on every page on the internet? Could it be more focused? This just seems like a solvable problem once there are enough smart, motivated people. Which there appear to be.

pythux 6y ago
The main barrier to enter the search market is not tech, it's money: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-one-click-and-27-billion-us-dollars-away.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-... And of course there are lots of other issues. For example the Web is very hostile when you are not Google Bot (i.e. there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing).
- brundolf 6y ago
  The money mentioned in that article is about being the default search engine, not being a functional one. Basically the question I'm asking is why DDG has to outsource to Bing. > there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing If you're talking about robots.txt, that's just a suggestion. It doesn't hold any actual preventative power.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    IP blocking and rate limiting for clients outside the blessed range operated by G
jonas21 6y ago
Indexing isn't the hard part. Ranking is. For any given query, there are probably millions of web pages that match. How do you pick the best ones to show the user? How do you do that even when most people are really bad at expressing what they want? Even if all websites were acting in good faith, this would be a really hard problem. Now add in the fact that there's an $80 billion industry devoted to gaming search results, and it suddenly becomes much harder. Would it be impossible to build a search engine as good as Google? No. But you could very well spend billions of dollars to match or even slightly surpass Google's performance and still lose. Why? Because unless it's clear and obvious that you're superior to Google, people are still going to use Google because that's what they're used to. That's why the smart players in the space like DDG aren't competing head-to-head in search, and are instead focusing on areas, like privacy, where Google can't compete. As for the others, I suggest you try Googling "cuil" some time.

hyperfekt 6y ago

There is a vast number of search engines that are not Google, many of whom 'respect privacy' in some way. That does not make them noteworthy. None I've encountered so far are actually good enough to compete. This one doesn't seem any different.

afrojack123 6y ago

This is antitrust shenanigans. Google takes a loss on many of its products just to avoid antitrust. The big tech companies are an oligarchy. Move on.

Jyaif 6y ago

Paid for by the french taxpayers, which unfortunately includes me.

known 6y ago

I think Google is doing Page ranking + URL tracking; When I search for Trump it will dynamically stack up the URL based on the clicks it gets;

0x00101010 6y ago

Qwant is Springer. Springer is the company that tries to blackmail google and all others by lobbying into EU law (article 17, former 13) fighting a free and open internet. I don't know which is worse. Springer is the german Apple in terms of privacy.

janandonly 6y ago

My nextDNS blocks Qwant for some reason.... anyone an idea as to why?

AmazingTurtle 6y ago

yet another one. duck duck go? meeeen

totaldude87 6y ago

i tried a simple search - what is a tiered storage - https://www.qwant.com/?q=what%20is%20storage%20tiering&t=web https://www.qwant.com/?q=what%20is%20storage%20tiering&t=web top 5 are ads, nothing relevant :(

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago

Google doesn't work for me anyway because Google blocks VPNs (interferes with its spying I guess), but latest Firefox has a nice feature where you can conveniently select where your search goes to. So now 50% of my searches go directly to wikipedia without any middle-man, russian queries go to yandex, and the rest go to qwant, and if this doesn't work - to startpage, which feeds from google.

andysch 6y ago

Discovered Qwant through iodéOS, a pretty good privacy oriented mobile OS. I used to use ddgo but qwant is not so bad