many privacy search engines like duckduckgo really just query bing or google (sometimes through a proxy)...
any idea if qwant does this?
Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
41–50 of 125 posts
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#42European 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
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?
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#43I'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.
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.
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.
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#44Nice, 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.
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.
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.
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#45Been using qwant since it came out and I never looked back: great UI and search results
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#46Idk, 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™.
“Why Don’t We Have Both?” is a meme for a reason :P
Well at least for me, I'll wait for a non JS endpoint before trying some of this…
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#47I 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 no…
[deleted]
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#48European 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 from what I've tried this seems to work even without a searc…
I feel like Qwant works much better in french than english.
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#49European 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 from what I've tried this seems to work even without a searc…
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.
Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
#50Filtering 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.