Qwant is Springer. Springer is the company that tries to blackmail google and all others by lobbying into EU law (article 17, former 13) fighting a free and open internet. I don't know which is worse. Springer is the german Apple in terms of privacy.
Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
81–90 of 110 posts
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#82At 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.
Even all they did was be a private middleman that would still be useful.
That’s assuming that the users’ goal is to avoid be tracked rather than just replacing Google with Microsoft.
If Bing themselves wanted to get on the HN first page all they have to do is go all in on privacy.
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#83Maybe 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…
IIRC that thought process was where DDG started some years back now. It was developed in the open wrt HN, by a then HN regular.
My recollection is they started by doing their own crawling.
(I want to say the username was Weinberg?? But honestly can't recall if that's right.)
TBH it's probably also the thought that Google started on, as principally we had manual indexes back then.
Again IIRC, DDG got along way with private indexing and then realised it didn't really gain them much and they instead wanted to focus on being a Google competitor. They did that by focusing on instant answers as a distributing feature and by buying results to get closer to the coverage they needed.
Lucky for them Google made their search a lot worse so DDG's quality caught up.
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Go…
Yeah, it's already on my bucket list, asking because Qwant looks self-hostable as well :)
Still some privacy benefits in not having physical location tied to searches, and an instance can be shared with friends and family.
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#85I'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.
It's not the job of each individual application to do everything. If you want privacy of your web activities, use Tor, which will work for every website. That's the best you can, even though it is not perfect.
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#86My nextDNS blocks Qwant for some reason.... anyone an idea as to why?
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#87Earlier 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.
I think you can add +g to make DDG display Google results instead. But yes, it is not documented that well.
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#88yet another one. duck duck go? meeeen
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#89Earlier 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.
Whether your business appears good on search results is a highly subjective indicator of quality though.
If the name is quite unique it's a good indicator because some site with high pagerank and lot of seo that list other websites/companies/software are sometime higher than the original site (stackshare.io or alternativeto.net for example)
Re: Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
#90Maybe 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…
IIRC that thought process was where DDG started some years back now. It was developed in the open wrt HN, by a then HN regular. My recollection is they started by doing their own crawling. (I want to say the username was Weinberg?? But honestly can't recall if that's right.) TBH it's probably also the thought that Google started on, as principally we had manual indexes back then. Again IIRC, DDG got along way with pr…
Gabriel Weinberg, aka ei0Bauqu
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu