91–100 of 110 posts
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've been trying to get search results for months now, and Qwant just fails everytime with a white screen of death. See screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/jUv6vm0 I've even tried with different IPs / VPN connections and it still refuses to show results. Surely I'm not the only user who experiences this?
That also happens to me if I disable javascript (and therefore get their Qwant Lite page). However, it works if you use a non-English language: https://lite.qwant.com/?l=de&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=en&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=es&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=foobar
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://www.qwant.com/?q=what%20is%20storage%20tiering&t=web
top 5 are ads, nothing relevant :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That also happens to me if I disable javascript (and therefore get their Qwant Lite page). However, it works if you use a non-English language: https://lite.qwant.com/?l=de&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=en&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=es&q=foobar https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=foobar
But why does one have to resort to hacks like this? I want the English version to work. Obviously Qwant have to iron this out, but I've waited months and they haven't even fixed it. It's a huge bug. It's like they just abandoned the project.
I used it for a long time (and 2 years as my main search engine) for 3 reasons... - it is french - it is working in Europa/USA/China (I studied in Paris/San Francisco/Tianjin) - my best friend used to works their. We had some good talks about Qwant, but it will not be relevant for my user review. So here we are: 1. They are not Open-Source (as opposite to Searx). Only the plugins are. Can we trust them when they say…
* They promised (to the public and their investors, which includes the state funds) that if they used Bing, they were improving they own engine which was handling more and more queries. Studied showed it was not the case, that many searches showed outdated results and repeating entries (to make think they have many search results).
* Their previous boss was a tyrannic Jobs wannabe. He wanted Qwant to become as trendy as Google so he kept launching half-baked products (Qwant maps! Qwant mail! etc). Constant chance of priorities and new projects were devastating for developers (especially when the search engine was still very weak). He was finally pushed out of the company.
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 informat…
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.
Qwant is a completely independent search engine though, as far as I'm aware it's not using Bing underneath the hood anymore
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…