Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

qwant.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#51

Post by brundolf »

pythux wrote: post #48
brundolf wrote: post #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…

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).

The money mentioned in that article is about being the default search engine, not being a functional one. Basically the question I'm asking is why DDG has to outsource to Bing.

> there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing

If you're talking about robots.txt, that's just a suggestion. It doesn't hold any actual preventative power.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#52

Post by jonas21 »

brundolf wrote: post #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…

Indexing isn't the hard part. Ranking is. For any given query, there are probably millions of web pages that match. How do you pick the best ones to show the user? How do you do that even when most people are really bad at expressing what they want?

Even if all websites were acting in good faith, this would be a really hard problem. Now add in the fact that there's an $80 billion industry devoted to gaming search results, and it suddenly becomes much harder.

Would it be impossible to build a search engine as good as Google? No. But you could very well spend billions of dollars to match or even slightly surpass Google's performance and still lose. Why? Because unless it's clear and obvious that you're superior to Google, people are still going to use Google because that's what they're used to.

That's why the smart players in the space like DDG aren't competing head-to-head in search, and are instead focusing on areas, like privacy, where Google can't compete. As for the others, I suggest you try Googling "cuil" some time.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#53

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Dahoon wrote: post #38
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.

If I am not mistaken, only Startpage and DDG will allow HTTP POST instead of GET.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#55

Post by Dahoon »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #53
Dahoon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I am not mistaken, only Startpage and DDG will allow HTTP POST instead of GET.

Startpage.com's new owner makes it less private than doing a search on Facebook while logged into your Google Chrome account.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#56

Post by 3np »

maverick74 wrote: post #15
Mizza wrote: 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!!!

Looking at their repos, it seems it’s mostly metasearch. Only crawler I see is specifically for news.

I’d be curious to hear if anyone self hosted this and searx and how they compare.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#57

Post by Dahoon »

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.

So just like Qwant except no ties to the US.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#58

Post by quesera »

jascii wrote: post #46

In our (US) current political climate I can't help but cringe a bit at the prominent use of the letter Q and the claim of privacy. I doubt there is a relation with the conspiracy theory group, but the marketing seems a bit awkward.

Q is a perfectly good letter. Don't surrender it to the creeps.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#60

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Dahoon wrote: post #55
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am not mistaken, only Startpage and DDG will allow HTTP POST instead of GET.

Startpage.com's new owner makes it less private than doing a search on Facebook while logged into your Google Chrome account.

What is a "Chrome account"? Web browsers ask users to "sign-up" now? For what?
Post reply on HN