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I'd be very careful with Qwant. They have taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something b
by weinzierl 2y ago
I'd be very careful with Qwant.
They have taken major investment from Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) and the day will come when the publisher wants something back for its investment.
If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly.
Ecosia looks a lot better at first sight. No obvious ties to traditional media and they make no secret out of their political affiliations. Yet, I doubt they are profitable. I have no energy today to go down that rabbit hole but I'd like to see where their money really comes from.
- VSerge 2y agoQwant is infamous in France for having made big claims and failed repeatedly. It was for the longest time just a wrapper around Bing, while claiming otherwise.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoI can confirm this. I was already cautious with Qwant because it was, from the very beginning, the worst search engine I've ever seen.
- nunobrito 2y agoThat isn't the case, the engine is quite capable. Have been using for 10 years as replacement for google. Only stopped recently because any AI is now better at answering most technical questions.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHow was it more capable then google?
- nunobrito 2y agoIt isn't more capable than Google. It is certainly more private than Google and capable enough to answer my daily questions. For me it is important to reduce as much as possible the entrapment from google services.
- bad_user 2y agoYes, be careful with Qwant, use Google or Bing.
- amarcheschi 2y agoAt this point, basically most of my searches on the web are either through brave search, or on Google followed by "... Reddit". At least in the not so distant past, I've found qwant to be slightly worse than google
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2y agoWhy not try Kagi? Serious question.
- amarcheschi 2y agoHonestly, I do not feel like needing something "more" than what I use right now. I'd say that reddit suffices for (almost) everything I need that I can't find with a simple search on brave search or Google
- dingnuts 2y agoReddit comments are mostly bots shilling ideology or products nowadays though. At least that's the impression I get.
- amarcheschi 2y agoIt's still okay for specific niches or local communities imho
- jorvi 2y agoKagi allows you to do things like inject CSS to filter out pre-translated Reddit results (although it is on their radar to make this a default setting). Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations: (technically you could inject it as a userscript but that's a bit more involved on mobile) /* Hide pre-translated webpages. "sri-group" is main result, "__srgi" are sub results. You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations. */ :is(div.__srgi, div.sri group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) { display: none !important; } Although the main draw is being able to uprank, downrank and block sites in your results. They also do things like deprioritizing and labeling AI in image search, and concatenating listicles ("10 best Android note taking apps") under a single header.
- staticelf 2y agoSo... why would you be more careful with that than Google or Bing? No matter what search engine you use, you will have a company with their agenda behind it.
- dantondwa 2y agoEcosia is a non-profit, so being profitable is not their mission. Each month they publish a breakdown of their expenses and donations. In January they got around 4 million euros, so I’d say they are certainly successful at what they do.
- short_sells_poo 2y ago> Ecosia is a non-profit, so being profitable is not their mission. So was OpenAI, but people develop amazingly flexible morals when someone throws big $$$ at them. Not saying this will happen to Ecosia, I wish them all the best, but at this point I have zero trust in promises and statements like "we'll never do X". Again, that's not to say they are unscrupulous, they might have the best intentions of "never doing X", but such promises are extremely difficult to keep if they ever become a huge success.
- azeirah 2y agoAre there differences between what non-profits are allowed to do in Germany vs the US? I'm assuming that German has stricter rules, but I wouldn't know.
- short_sells_poo 2y agoIt doesn't matter what the law allows unfortunately. If enough money is involved, everything is possible. Law is what people make it, and people can be bought and sold. It's not some fundamental physical constant of the universe. This is why statements like this feel like empty posturing (even if the intentions are genuine and good).
- pythux 2y ago> If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly. Your sentence seems to imply that Cliqz was collecting "[the] data" like American companies (which companies? Which data?). Can you clarify what you are referring to? Disclaimer: I worked at Cliqz
- baxtr 2y agothx for reminding me. The Cliqz story was absolutely insane. I think they burnt over 100 mio euros for basically nothing. They had no strategy whatsoever.
- h1fra 2y agoQwant is led by one of the most questionable CEO in France. Driven by pure ego and bad management. Instead of building one good product (search), they tried to compete with almost everyone, and especially with every Google products (qwant mail, qwant maps, qwant music, etc.)
- tcit 2y agoLéandri left Qwant 5 years ago though, and most of their plans for mail, maps, etc have been abandoned. The new owner is Octave Klaba (from OVH).
- wiether 2y agoThe history of Qwant itself should be a big red-flag. At this point, why keeping the brand? They have no real IP of interest and they are only associated with bad things... for the few people that knows them. The only thing that is stable in its history, is the public funds put in there... Now I assume that it's the only reason for Qwant to exist: to get public funding and do everything but an actual European search engine/index. Also, Octave is quite successful on his hardware/network ventures, it's the complete opposite for the software/service part. OVH would be much more popular if they knew how to make software, which is a decent Manager. Hubic is another disaster from Roubaix. So this partnership is pretty meaningless for us I'm afraid.
- nunobrito 2y agoI've been using Qwant, people have to be paid and there was never silence about the difficulties that qwant had. In fact, it would be odd if they would be hiring people and not really clear how they are being paid. I'm happy for them on this partnership.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago[dead]
- qwertox 2y agoThe Axel Springer-Verlag (Publisher) is nothing to be toying around with and accepting money from them is like making a deal with the devil. They own the news from the entire range of lower working class up to the upper middle class and have no hesitation in using those channels to brainwash those targets with the political views which Mathias Döpfner wants to be seen spread. Second to none in Germany, but probably normal in the US.
- BSDobelix 2y ago>>Axel Springer-Verlag (Publisher) is nothing to be toying around with The real question is: Is Elliot Carver (from James Bond -> Tomorrow Never Dies) based on Mathias Döpfner or Rupert Murdoch?
- TeMPOraL 2y agoIn the spirit of international cooperation: ¿Por qué no los dos?
- morkalork 2y agoWould you say they are comparable to Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black then?
- luckylion 2y ago> They own the news from the entire range of lower working class up to the upper middle class With a 10% market share? Come on.
- dumbledoren 2y agoConsidering how German government is persecuting people for being pro-Palestine, I wouldn't want to share one bit of data with German entities.