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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

#41
post #29
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a front for Bing. The company is pure hype, no results.

It's a bit more than just hype: it's rebranding Bing results to make them more palatable to a EU audience, while guzzling on public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather support from nationalists. There are actual results - as a public subsidies scam!

Are they the ones who received one billion eur from the EU? Holy cow...

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#42
post #30

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.

Is that meant to imply that the privacy protection and un-bubbling of the "middle men" is bogus? (I don't know about Qwant, but DDG isn't solely Bing, and it feeds some worthwhile organizations with donations.)

I think DDG is more of a legitimate competitor in the search space than other engines running off the Bing index. My understanding is that they've been pretty transparent about using Bing and Yandex as sources for its product, have done quite a bit of work to tailor the results they spit back, and maintain their own knowledge graph for features like instant answers. They seem to function more as a metasearch engine.

From ehat I've seen, search engines like Ecosia and Qwant aren't very clear about what they bring to the table, beyond serving as a proxy for Bing that doesn't store as much data on you.

I don't think there's anything explicitly wrong with that. But I don't think they really merit anybody's attention either. Especially since they don't explicitly advertise what they are.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#43
I use the putlocker test to determine if/when a search engine ceases to provide useful results. If a search for putlocker only yields .com domains and the like, it no is longer prioritizing the most useful results.

Google long ago stopped returning useful results for my academic research. For example, it never returns Wikipedia articles unless I explicitly use Wikipedia as a keyword, which I now have to do for most of my searchers.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#44
post #2

This was posted in another thread, but I'd never seen it before. French-made. Results seem just as good as Google, PutLocker searchers work, and it's as privacy-respecting as DDG. I've been using it all day and I'm happy with the results, so I thought I'd share.

I have a better one: https://infinitySearch.Co It's Open-source, it's a search engine (they have their own crawler and their own index) and it's private!!!

Seems like a cool search engine but wish they didn't go so heavy on the box shadows

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#47
Maybe this is naive, but I don't understand what Google's impenetrable moat is around search.

It's a hard technical problem, but not one with a concrete barrier to entry. And there are lots of really smart people solving really hard technical problems out in the open. On top of that, much of the recent progress in AI is open-source. Surely that could help?

I guess indexing at that scale takes a lot of hardware. This is the most plausible barrier that I can see, but it still doesn't seem insurmountable.

What if you rethought what a search engine is? Does it really have to cover all of the text on every page on the internet? Could it be more focused?

This just seems like a solvable problem once there are enough smart, motivated people. Which there appear to be.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#48

Maybe this is naive, but I don't understand what Google's impenetrable moat is around search. It's a hard technical problem, but not one with a concrete barrier to entry. And there are lots of really smart people solving really hard technical problems out in the open. On top of that, much of the recent progress in AI is open-source. Surely that could help? I guess indexing at that scale takes a lot of hardware. This…

The main barrier to enter the search market is not tech, it's money: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-...

And of course there are lots of other issues. For example the Web is very hostile when you are not Google Bot (i.e. there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing).

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that meant to imply that the privacy protection and un-bubbling of the "middle men" is bogus? (I don't know about Qwant, but DDG isn't solely Bing, and it feeds some worthwhile organizations with donations.)

I think DDG is more of a legitimate competitor in the search space than other engines running off the Bing index. My understanding is that they've been pretty transparent about using Bing and Yandex as sources for its product, have done quite a bit of work to tailor the results they spit back, and maintain their own knowledge graph for features like instant answers. They seem to function more as a metasearch engine.…

Ecosia explicitly specifies "Results from Microsoft" on every results page, so they seem pretty transparent there. I don't think DuckDuckGo and Qwant are as upfront about that.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#50
post #4
post #2

This was posted in another thread, but I'd never seen it before. French-made. Results seem just as good as Google, PutLocker searchers work, and it's as privacy-respecting as DDG. I've been using it all day and I'm happy with the results, so I thought I'd share.

It's just a front for Bing. The company is pure hype, no results.

Someone should make a Medium post about how to make your own privacy focused search engine using Bing's API.
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