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Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

about.qwant.com

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Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#101

Post by lloeki »

everyone wrote: post #97
Annatar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"A lot of Europe is still conceptually stuck in the pre-UNIX, lone desktop Windows/MS-DOS, early ’90’s era" So Europe is stuck in the 90's which somehow predates the 70's ?? .. "while the rest of the world runs them by with macOS PC’s and iPads" Buying istuff is somehow progressive?

It's not the buying hardware thing that's important:

> conceptually stuck in the pre-UNIX, lone desktop Windows/MS-DOS

It's about understanding that quality matters, that UX is a thing, that design is more than just a theme, that machines are networked to varying degrees and frequency, with varying performance profiles, form factors and interaction models, and that this field is different from fordist industrial endeavours and you'd better read the Mythical Man Month if you want to have any chance at a viable let alone competitive RTT instead of treating your coding engineers as crappy brick layers.

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#102

Post by carvalho »

Annatar wrote: post #94
carvalho wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of a random error message where the results do not match?

Try to compile some software, if you get a compile error paste the generic portion into Google and watch it become completely useless.

Thanks, but can you please give a specific example?

One, I do not share this experience, and think the quality issue is overstated (you are more likely to remember the time that a query failed, than when it succeeded).

Two, if you can produce a POC, Google can use this to improve the search results.

As is, the issue brought up by original poster is too vague and unspecified to be of any use.

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#103

Post by dijit »

myf01d wrote: post #82
Nux wrote: post #77

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 d…

> 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?

You are conflating two different things. It is indeed completely possible to have nice looking websites without javascript. Heavy use of javascript is often a huge waste of resources anyway.

The question is only; how much is too much. And considering your competition is Google, that answer is: not a lot.

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#104

Post by kire456 »

myf01d wrote: post #82
Nux wrote: post #77

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 d…

> 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?

Not parent, but Javascript enables a lot of nasty business and often slows pages down on my not-so-fast work PC, so I disable it. If a website has a good reason to need it (e.g. apps like Google Docs), it gets whitelisted. Typically, one doesn't need a script for displaying text and filling forms.

Let's reverse the question: the task "map this text input to a list of links" could be done in 1998 with no scripts, why is it dependent on JS in 2017?

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#105

Post by DCRichards »

itronitron wrote: post #91
5kyn3t wrote: post #61

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/ A plus point is that qwant also supports hashbangs like duckduckgo.

looks promising, qwanting 'java concurrency' gives a nice set of relevant results

I hope that one day when Qwant is big, this is cited as the first use of 'qwanting'

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#106

Post by smhenderson »

Nux wrote: post #77

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 d…

I see others already mentioned the lite version. For a quickly loading page with minimal extras that just let's you search you can try https://ixquick.com.

It integrates nicely into Firefox. I've found results to be pretty good and relevant when I use it. Found it before DDG and now I use both depending on what machine I'm on.

Anyway, they claim they are "the world's most private search engine".

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#108

Post by Nux »

m_t wrote: post #98
Nux wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, "lite" should be the default really. Much better. I don't see that green plus you are talking about, I stared and stared.

Here's a screencap on my end: https://imgur.com/9ZgNh4Y

Thanks, I was blind, but now I see.

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#109

Post by [deleted] »

myf01d wrote: post #82
Nux wrote: post #77

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 d…

> 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?

[deleted]

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#110

Post by nottorp »

carvalho wrote: post #102
Annatar wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to compile some software, if you get a compile error paste the generic portion into Google and watch it become completely useless.

Thanks, but can you please give a specific example? One, I do not share this experience, and think the quality issue is overstated (you are more likely to remember the time that a query failed, than when it succeeded). Two, if you can produce a POC, Google can use this to improve the search results. As is, the issue brought up by original poster is too vague and unspecified to be of any use.

Dude, you're treating it like a bug. It's not. It's intentional behaviour that started 2-3 years ago. Instead of giving you just the formerly relevant results, they give you all kinds of crap that they think you are interested in.

You can still revert to the original behaviour by selecting 'Verbatim' from the search tools menu, but you cannot make it default. And in time I'm sure some marketing head will remove even that option.

Edit: and if you never experience it, my guess is you're working with some technology that's "in fashion".

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