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Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

qwant.com

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Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#31

Post by 1996 »

crocodiletears wrote: post #17

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.

I use Bing (and Edge, and Windows 10...) but for the average HN reader that's not cool enough. Tech is more and more about personal branding and following the hype train. DDG is in. Bing is not.

Also, for the older crowd who came from slashdot (and still says 'Micro$oft') it'd be morally unacceptable to use Bing directly. They prefer either a rebrand, or to directly give all their data to Google (maybe because they still see it as fresh and new?)

So close, but no cigar.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#32

Post by not2b »

1996 wrote: post #31
crocodiletears wrote: post #17

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.

I use Bing (and Edge, and Windows 10...) but for the average HN reader that's not cool enough. Tech is more and more about personal branding and following the hype train. DDG is in. Bing is not. Also, for the older crowd who came from slashdot (and still says 'Micro$oft') it'd be morally unacceptable to use Bing directly. They prefer either a rebrand, or to directly give all their data to Google (maybe because they s…

DDG isn't just a rebrand of Bing (and wouldn't be even if they did all searches via Bing); they don't pass personal information along to Bing that would allow Microsoft to track the user.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#33

Post by 1996 »

not2b wrote: post #32
1996 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Bing (and Edge, and Windows 10...) but for the average HN reader that's not cool enough. Tech is more and more about personal branding and following the hype train. DDG is in. Bing is not. Also, for the older crowd who came from slashdot (and still says 'Micro$oft') it'd be morally unacceptable to use Bing directly. They prefer either a rebrand, or to directly give all their data to Google (maybe because they s…

DDG isn't just a rebrand of Bing (and wouldn't be even if they did all searches via Bing); they don't pass personal information along to Bing that would allow Microsoft to track the user.

Do you really think that makes any serious difference if the sites you're visiting serves google ad or uses google analytics?

You think you are doing something, but I have strong reservations it achieves anything except making you feel better and more in control.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#35

Post by gnufx »

rasengan wrote: post #9
shirakawasuna wrote: post #6

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.

Private.sh encrypts queries on the client side and routes requests thru proxies to maximize privacy.

Also https://swisscows.com/

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#36

Post by gnufx »

1996 wrote: post #33
not2b wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG isn't just a rebrand of Bing (and wouldn't be even if they did all searches via Bing); they don't pass personal information along to Bing that would allow Microsoft to track the user.

Do you really think that makes any serious difference if the sites you're visiting serves google ad or uses google analytics? You think you are doing something, but I have strong reservations it achieves anything except making you feel better and more in control.

> Do you really think that makes any serious difference if the sites you're visiting serves google ad or uses google analytics?

Yes, if you block those. You're also not in a search bubble.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#37

Post by ChuckMcM »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #28

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…

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" :-)

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#38

Post by Dahoon »

crocodiletears wrote: post #17

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.

I just did a search on our business and the results were not the same, just like DDG and Bing isn't the same. From best to worst result on the same search string:

Google > Startpage > Qwant > Bing > DDG

But even if they were 100% identical, it has some privacy unlike 3 out of the other 4.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#39

Post by abc-xyz »

not2b wrote: post #32
1996 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Bing (and Edge, and Windows 10...) but for the average HN reader that's not cool enough. Tech is more and more about personal branding and following the hype train. DDG is in. Bing is not. Also, for the older crowd who came from slashdot (and still says 'Micro$oft') it'd be morally unacceptable to use Bing directly. They prefer either a rebrand, or to directly give all their data to Google (maybe because they s…

DDG isn't just a rebrand of Bing (and wouldn't be even if they did all searches via Bing); they don't pass personal information along to Bing that would allow Microsoft to track the user.

We don’t know that. I mean all they have to show for it is a privacy policy and a few articles saying “we value privacy”. If they truly cared about privacy then why wouldn’t they be open source?

I feel DDG can be compared to Apple in many ways, but here’s it’s important to look at what Apple is doing to its Chinese users by letting the CCP spy on all their iCloud data (sacrifice all the privacy values to obtain access to China’s market). Perhaps DuckDuckGo have also been forced to sacrifice their users’ privacy to join Microsoft Advertising as well? It’s difficult to tell since they’re closed source, and Microsoft Advertising is a private ad network (anyone besides DDG/Ecosia that’s been invited?) that doesn’t make any API documentation publicly available. At least with Bing’s API we can tell that Microsoft just need the search query for it to work, but how about their Microsoft’s advertising API?

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#40

Post by fabrice_d »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #28

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…

The curl request needs a UA header as you noticed:

curl 'https://api.qwant.com/api/search/videos?q=example&count=150&...' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/84.0'

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