8 ms·

French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

72 points by ColinHayhurst 5y ago

baud147258 5y ago
I remember trying Qwant a few years ago and I wasn't really happy with it, both for search results and UI/UX. Staying with a Google search alternative, I went with DuckDuckGo and didn't look back (especially with access to g! to easily search on Google if ddg fails to dig up what I want)
- mouldysammich 5y ago
  Qwant does support !g etc if you end up needing it.
  - alex_anglin 5y ago
    Is there any reason to use Qwant over DDG, aside from a Francophone focus?
    - throwaway4good 5y ago
      Not American and thus not subject to us intelligence surveillance.
      - ciupicri 5y ago
        Isn't it vice-versa? It's hard from a legal point of view to spy on one of your own, but it's easier to do it on a foreign entity? > During the 2013 NSA leaks Internet spying scandal, the surveillance agencies of the "Five Eyes" have been accused of intentionally spying on one another's citizens and willingly sharing the collected information with each other, allegedly circumventing laws preventing each agency from spying on its own citizens. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Controversy
        throwaway4good 5y ago
        Yes. I was assuming an European perspective - also I don’t think any European intelligence service have anywhere near the capabilities of the US ones.
belatw 5y ago
They’re begging to sell 5-7.5% of the compny for €8m? Sounds like it is time for Qwant to give up.
- conradfr 5y ago
  It's all political and diversion of public funds (if that's the correct English term, I edited "money laundering" out). Qwant should be dead, it is said most of its index is served by Bing anyway (they used to hide it for years and lie about their own indexing stats).
  - GordonS 5y ago
    Can you substantiate these (seemingly bizarre) claims of money laundering?
    - bleuarff 5y ago
      France has invested a lot of money into this company. And it was approved to become the official search engine on many state administration's computers, even after an audit revealed the terrible quality of their product. Things are a bit shady around Qwant, and this is ground for all kind of suspicions (not that I'm endorsing any).
      - GordonS 5y ago
        That does not fit any definition of money laundering. It sounds more like decisions are being made based on politics, presumably with an eye to the long-term improvement and viability of Qwant.
      - gabaix 5y ago
        Neither 'diversion of public funds' (I believe you mean embezzlement) nor 'money laundering' would fit the description. This is more akin to 'poor use of public funds', which is also common in the US, and equally frown upon.
tchalla 5y ago
> The company lost €13 million in 2020, €23 million in 2019 and €11.2 million in 2018 for revenues that amount respectively for €7.5 million, €5.8 million and €3 million. Pfft ... this seems to be peanuts for the Silicon Valley VCs out there.
- thepangolino 5y ago
  They've got a terrible, terrible product. Not sure they would have received anything from a Silicon Valley VC.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That's not how it works. In SV they would have received 10fold the funding that they received in Europe. As a result, most likely they would have had a better product.
    - tormeh 5y ago
      Not so sure. Why compete with Google by trying to do exactly the same thing, but worse? It's a shitty business plan. Might even be too shit for SV.
      - raverbashing 5y ago
        > trying to do exactly the same thing, but worse You mean launching Google when we have Altavista? Launching FB when we have LiveJournal? (I mean at founding/initial version level, of course they became better than their competition, but that took time) The sad part about this is that $8Mi is peanuts.
        kmlx 5y ago
        > You mean launching Google when we have Altavista? google was miles ahead of altavista. > Launching FB when we have LiveJournal FB was miles ahead of LiveJournal. —- a trend appears…
dantondwa 5y ago
In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface. I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me). Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise from it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ricardo81 5y ago
  I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.
  - dantondwa 5y ago
    Really? That’s disappointing. Thanks for the heads up, I guess this explains why the results were good.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise? edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself
    - ricardo81 5y ago
      I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations. >edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google. If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.
ColinHayhurst 5y ago
It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still another choice. The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; especially as they own the publisher. It might be a call for another more palatable, to them, savior. Their efforts to develop their own index would offer a real alternative and this is important for society and the economy. This article [0] dicusses those struggles saying “The technology developed worked super well on a few million indexed pages, but needed to be modified to operate on a larger scale,”. Certainly building an index for billions of pages and which operates fast is a big challenge we had to get over. There are many choices to make when designing, developing and deploying each of the three elements of a crawler, index and ranking engine. And those choices lead to big differences in SERPs: differences that are very distinct compared with what is offered between a search "engine" company and any of their syndication partners. Self-disclosure: CEO of a search engine company [0] http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-google-francais/amp/ http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-goo...
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  What is Huawei’s strategy here? Other than they need a non US search engine for their European audience.
  - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
    That might well be a main reason. Plus search options for HarmonyOS beyond Petal Search. But the article states the main aim IMO: "Financial backing could mean the Chinese player gains a say over the company's operations, at a time when Huawei stands accused by several governments of spying and has been pushed out of key markets."
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    For any sufficiently large Chinese company substitute 'China'.
coliveira 5y ago
What they call here a "bailout loan" is what Americans call next round of funding for tech companies.
Udik 5y ago
> backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Qwant was designed to become a rival to U.S. search giant Google and bolster the EU's tech sector How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU. Really, it's cringe worth. The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself. (European here, just in case someone takes this for some nationalistic rant from the US).
- ErrrNoMate 5y ago
  They did copy SV, the product just sources results from Bing, like DuckDuckGo does.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself. This is also why there won't ever be a EU Silicon Valley. Paris isn't going to support any Europe-wide effort to create one that isn't located in the Hexagon, nor will Berlin support one that isn't somewhere in Germany. London pre-Brexit would not and did not support anything that might take away from Silicon Fen. While other US states encourage their own tech centers' growth, Floridians and New Yorkers and Texans are all aware of, benefit from, and are proud of Silicon Valley being in the US. This can't and won't happen in the EU unless and until people feel more strongly that they are EU citizens than of their own countries, and maybe not even then.
- tester756 5y ago
  The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself. did china copy SV to setup their comparable companies? tencent, alibaba, baidu
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
Looks like a smart move to me. Borrow 8 million, bankruptcy the next day, and pocket it all. China can have all the remaining junk from the junk company.
Popegaf 5y ago
Well, they didn't innovate. They didn't add anything new to searches nor can I find a real differentiator in the product. It's a "privacy search engine that uses bing... but French!". It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking browser-extension, there are no special integrations with any services, no new ways of filtering stuff (e.g a list of people who rate search results that you can subscribe to), just... there's nothing really attractive or catchy about it. They could've taken or forked Yacy (federated, opensource search engine), dumped those millions into it and made it a serious project, but alas
- drannex 5y ago
  They don't use bing for the most part, they have their own crawlers and their results are far better than nearly any other competitor. I have been a happy user for the past two years. They use Bing for their ad network, and to sometimes (rarely) produce results when their own crawlers fail.

72 points by ColinHayhurst 5y ago

I remember trying Qwant a few years ago and I wasn't really happy with it, both for search results and UI/UX. Staying with a Google search alternative, I went with DuckDuckGo and didn't look back (especially with access to g! to easily search on Google if ddg fails to dig up what I want)

mouldysammich 5y ago
Qwant does support !g etc if you end up needing it.
- alex_anglin 5y ago
  Is there any reason to use Qwant over DDG, aside from a Francophone focus?
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    Not American and thus not subject to us intelligence surveillance.
    - ciupicri 5y ago
      Isn't it vice-versa? It's hard from a legal point of view to spy on one of your own, but it's easier to do it on a foreign entity? > During the 2013 NSA leaks Internet spying scandal, the surveillance agencies of the "Five Eyes" have been accused of intentionally spying on one another's citizens and willingly sharing the collected information with each other, allegedly circumventing laws preventing each agency from spying on its own citizens. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Controversy
      - throwaway4good 5y ago
        Yes. I was assuming an European perspective - also I don’t think any European intelligence service have anywhere near the capabilities of the US ones.

belatw 5y ago

They’re begging to sell 5-7.5% of the compny for €8m? Sounds like it is time for Qwant to give up.

conradfr 5y ago
It's all political and diversion of public funds (if that's the correct English term, I edited "money laundering" out). Qwant should be dead, it is said most of its index is served by Bing anyway (they used to hide it for years and lie about their own indexing stats).
- GordonS 5y ago
  Can you substantiate these (seemingly bizarre) claims of money laundering?
  - bleuarff 5y ago
    France has invested a lot of money into this company. And it was approved to become the official search engine on many state administration's computers, even after an audit revealed the terrible quality of their product. Things are a bit shady around Qwant, and this is ground for all kind of suspicions (not that I'm endorsing any).
    - GordonS 5y ago
      That does not fit any definition of money laundering. It sounds more like decisions are being made based on politics, presumably with an eye to the long-term improvement and viability of Qwant.
    - gabaix 5y ago
      Neither 'diversion of public funds' (I believe you mean embezzlement) nor 'money laundering' would fit the description. This is more akin to 'poor use of public funds', which is also common in the US, and equally frown upon.

tchalla 5y ago

> The company lost €13 million in 2020, €23 million in 2019 and €11.2 million in 2018 for revenues that amount respectively for €7.5 million, €5.8 million and €3 million. Pfft ... this seems to be peanuts for the Silicon Valley VCs out there.

thepangolino 5y ago
They've got a terrible, terrible product. Not sure they would have received anything from a Silicon Valley VC.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's not how it works. In SV they would have received 10fold the funding that they received in Europe. As a result, most likely they would have had a better product.
  - tormeh 5y ago
    Not so sure. Why compete with Google by trying to do exactly the same thing, but worse? It's a shitty business plan. Might even be too shit for SV.
    - raverbashing 5y ago
      > trying to do exactly the same thing, but worse You mean launching Google when we have Altavista? Launching FB when we have LiveJournal? (I mean at founding/initial version level, of course they became better than their competition, but that took time) The sad part about this is that $8Mi is peanuts.
      - kmlx 5y ago
        > You mean launching Google when we have Altavista? google was miles ahead of altavista. > Launching FB when we have LiveJournal FB was miles ahead of LiveJournal. —- a trend appears…

dantondwa 5y ago

In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface. I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me). Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise from it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ricardo81 5y ago
I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.
- dantondwa 5y ago
  Really? That’s disappointing. Thanks for the heads up, I guess this explains why the results were good.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise? edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself
  - ricardo81 5y ago
    I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations. >edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google. If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.

ColinHayhurst 5y ago

It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still another choice. The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; especially as they own the publisher. It might be a call for another more palatable, to them, savior. Their efforts to develop their own index would offer a real alternative and this is important for society and the economy. This article [0] dicusses those struggles saying “The technology developed worked super well on a few million indexed pages, but needed to be modified to operate on a larger scale,”. Certainly building an index for billions of pages and which operates fast is a big challenge we had to get over. There are many choices to make when designing, developing and deploying each of the three elements of a crawler, index and ranking engine. And those choices lead to big differences in SERPs: differences that are very distinct compared with what is offered between a search "engine" company and any of their syndication partners. Self-disclosure: CEO of a search engine company [0] http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-google-francais/amp/ http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-goo...

throwaway4good 5y ago
What is Huawei’s strategy here? Other than they need a non US search engine for their European audience.
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  That might well be a main reason. Plus search options for HarmonyOS beyond Petal Search. But the article states the main aim IMO: "Financial backing could mean the Chinese player gains a say over the company's operations, at a time when Huawei stands accused by several governments of spying and has been pushed out of key markets."
- jacquesm 5y ago
  For any sufficiently large Chinese company substitute 'China'.

coliveira 5y ago

What they call here a "bailout loan" is what Americans call next round of funding for tech companies.

Udik 5y ago

> backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Qwant was designed to become a rival to U.S. search giant Google and bolster the EU's tech sector How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU. Really, it's cringe worth. The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself. (European here, just in case someone takes this for some nationalistic rant from the US).

ErrrNoMate 5y ago
They did copy SV, the product just sources results from Bing, like DuckDuckGo does.
TMWNN 5y ago
>The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself. This is also why there won't ever be a EU Silicon Valley. Paris isn't going to support any Europe-wide effort to create one that isn't located in the Hexagon, nor will Berlin support one that isn't somewhere in Germany. London pre-Brexit would not and did not support anything that might take away from Silicon Fen. While other US states encourage their own tech centers' growth, Floridians and New Yorkers and Texans are all aware of, benefit from, and are proud of Silicon Valley being in the US. This can't and won't happen in the EU unless and until people feel more strongly that they are EU citizens than of their own countries, and maybe not even then.
tester756 5y ago
The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself. did china copy SV to setup their comparable companies? tencent, alibaba, baidu

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

Looks like a smart move to me. Borrow 8 million, bankruptcy the next day, and pocket it all. China can have all the remaining junk from the junk company.

Popegaf 5y ago

Well, they didn't innovate. They didn't add anything new to searches nor can I find a real differentiator in the product. It's a "privacy search engine that uses bing... but French!". It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking browser-extension, there are no special integrations with any services, no new ways of filtering stuff (e.g a list of people who rate search results that you can subscribe to), just... there's nothing really attractive or catchy about it. They could've taken or forked Yacy (federated, opensource search engine), dumped those millions into it and made it a serious project, but alas

drannex 5y ago
They don't use bing for the most part, they have their own crawlers and their results are far better than nearly any other competitor. I have been a happy user for the past two years. They use Bing for their ad network, and to sometimes (rarely) produce results when their own crawlers fail.