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French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

politico.eu

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Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#41

Post by abawany »

dantondwa wrote: post #12

In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface. I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to s…

I've been using Qwant as my main search engine for 2 years at least and ime/imo the results were fine. When a given query didn't give the results I expected, I searched for the same in Google and often came away similarly disappointed. I'm sad to see that Qwant is struggling.

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#42

Post by Popegaf »

Well, they didn't innovate. They didn't add anything new to searches nor can I find a real differentiator in the product. It's a "privacy search engine that uses bing... but French!".

It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking browser-extension, there are no special integrations with any services, no new ways of filtering stuff (e.g a list of people who rate search results that you can subscribe to), just... there's nothing really attractive or catchy about it.

They could've taken or forked Yacy (federated, opensource search engine), dumped those millions into it and made it a serious project, but alas

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#43

Post by zozbot234 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #18
ColinHayhurst wrote: post #15

It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still another choice. The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; espec…

What is Huawei’s strategy here? Other than they need a non US search engine for their European audience.

Maybe they're trying to compete with Baidu.

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#44

Post by spywaregorilla »

ricardo81 wrote: post #28
dantondwa wrote: post #12

In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface. I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to s…

I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.

What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise?

edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#46

Post by julienreszka »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #15

It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still another choice. The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; espec…

It's not an alternative, it's a substitute, an ersatz.

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#47

Post by ricardo81 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #44
ricardo81 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.

What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise? edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations.

>edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google.

If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#48

Post by drannex »

Popegaf wrote: post #42

Well, they didn't innovate. They didn't add anything new to searches nor can I find a real differentiator in the product. It's a "privacy search engine that uses bing... but French!". It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking browser-extension, there are no special integration…

They don't use bing for the most part, they have their own crawlers and their results are far better than nearly any other competitor. I have been a happy user for the past two years.

They use Bing for their ad network, and to sometimes (rarely) produce results when their own crawlers fail.

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#49

Post by gopi »

ricardo81 wrote: post #47
spywaregorilla wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise? edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations. >edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google. If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.

Is it legal to scrape search results and use it in a competitive product?. Is this a legal grey area or its settled in court?

Re: French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

#50

Post by throwaway4good »

zozbot234 wrote: post #43
throwaway4good wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Huawei’s strategy here? Other than they need a non US search engine for their European audience.

Maybe they're trying to compete with Baidu.

They have a decent search engine in petal search:

https://petalsearch.com

This would be for a western european audience. I don't think you can get us to Baidu, however you can probably get us to use Qwant.

So maybe it is the brand they are after.

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