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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

#71
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!

>while guzzling on public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather support from nationalists.

This seems like a weird accusation given that government VC arms like In-Q-Tel or institutions like DARPA invest heavily in Silicon Valley tech firms, not to mention that the national science foundation supported the development of pagerank itself[1]. One of Apple's first investors was the Small Business Investment Company, an investment arm of the federal government. The EU would be stupid to not support the development of an independent technology sector.

[1]https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#72
post #20

I've been pretty happy with https://www.runnaroo.com/ for the past months

Yeah I saw that on the front page a few months back, and people seemed impressed with it. Although, I also remember seeing Qwant on the front page, or at least in the comments of another search engine post and people were impressed with it. Seems the tide has turned!

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#73
post #72
post #20

I've been pretty happy with https://www.runnaroo.com/ for the past months

Yeah I saw that on the front page a few months back, and people seemed impressed with it. Although, I also remember seeing Qwant on the front page, or at least in the comments of another search engine post and people were impressed with it. Seems the tide has turned!

What runnaroo seems to do that is working for me is to somehow prioritize programmer type hits. Maybe it's just the stack overflow source. The "skinned" Bing sites seems to localize too hard and prioritize shopping and big-news type hits. What I don't really like about Runnaroo is that it's hard to pin down who's behind it. It's seems to be just the one guy and I can relate to his need for privacy but on the other hand I can't 100% trust the "We don't save or sell your data"-claim when there is no one to hold accountable.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#74
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are about Yandex results. I always get a note when searching cyrillic content.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#75
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.…

Why are so many search engines trying to piggy back off other search engines? Can they not crawl sites themselves and cut out the extra layer? In a sea of bad websites I feel like if you started with a whitelist approach it could be a good basis.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#76
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To mine even more of your personal data.

They give you cloud sync functionality in return.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#77
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!!!

Thank you for the link.The search engine is pretty good.

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Why are so many search engines trying to piggy back off other search engines? Can they not crawl sites themselves and cut out the extra layer? In a sea of bad websites I feel like if you started with a whitelist approach it could be a good basis.

Crawling is difficult these days as recaptcha and other measures keep bots out if you are not google or MS

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#79
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I self-host SearX, and so can you. Its fairly easy with Docker [1]. However via self-hosting you don't get the anonymity benefits from their upstream (Bing, Yandex, whatever else you enable) which you do get via a public SearX. But with a public SearX instance you don't get the privacy benefits from that instance (ie. all searches can be traced to you).

So I end up using both public and self-hosted SearX, DDG, and Google as last resort.

[1] https://github.com/searx/searx-docker

Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy

#80
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.

I think Qwant predates the Q-phenomenon becoming mainstream by several years. Other than that, I agree with the other answer – Q is a perfectly good letter and we shouldn't let them steal it from us.
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