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Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

about.qwant.com

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Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#71

Post by ehllo »

fstephany wrote: post #48
lawl wrote: post #42

European here. First of all, this is okay. But not good. I've tried several "slang" searches that google gets just fine. I've tried these because ddg had/has problems with them for a long time. E.g. If I google for "poe shavs" (a slang term for an item with an abbreviation of the game name), I expect https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings from what I've tried this seems to work even without a searc…

I feel like Qwant works much better in french than english.

I think qwant is a company from france.

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#72

Post by cJ0th »

infbtag wrote: post #56
georgeglue1 wrote: post #41

many privacy search engines like duckduckgo really just query bing or google (sometimes through a proxy)... any idea if qwant does this?

https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-th... Although they just show Bing results for me so don't know how much of their own index is actually used.

It seems to depend on your location.

> In March 2017, news articles revealed Qwant displays mainly search results from Bing, except in France and Germany, despite several commitment to be exclusively "made in France".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#75

Post by johansch »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #57

How does qwant pays it bills? How do you do business? I didn't see any advertising, and there are no paid subscriptions, is the project funded by the EU?

> is the project funded by the EU?

Yes. The EIB "loaned" them 25 million Euro:

http://www.eib.org/infocentre/press/releases/all/2015/2015-2...

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#76

Post by sewer_bird »

kakarot wrote: post #53

The main thing I like about this service is the looks. It's mostly sleek and refreshingly minimal with a colorful and expressive logo to boot, a la Google. DDG on the other hand... while I love the idea and would love to use it more often, not only gives poor results for most of my searches but the heavy use of red literally gives me a physical anxiety that makes it basically unusable. I could style the page myself b…

DGG has about as much red on it as Hacker News: is it such a heavy use of color? At least on desktop in Safari, the site is pretty 'white', and I'm surprised you get literal physical anxiety.

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#77

Post by Nux »

Privacy loving European here.

I want to like it, but it gives off a bad vibe.

First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. Give me a text field, I don't care about the news.

Second, no easy way to add it in my Firefox search engine list. This is really something obvious they should fix, come on.

Third, they want you to install an extension that will indeed set qwant as default search engine, but also seems to try to shove down your throat some sort of bookmark and "board" (their own thing, pinterest like?) management which requires login to their service.

http://img.nux.ro/q9M-Menu_292.png

IMHO it doesn't really live up to the expectations and it seems more like a social media experiment attempt.

If we forego the whole privacy thing which I think they are only using for marketing here, then the search results don't seem too bad (in my 2 minutes of testing) and the boards thing is interesting, but nah.

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#78

Post by frik »

lawl wrote: post #42

European here. First of all, this is okay. But not good. I've tried several "slang" searches that google gets just fine. I've tried these because ddg had/has problems with them for a long time. E.g. If I google for "poe shavs" (a slang term for an item with an abbreviation of the game name), I expect https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings from what I've tried this seems to work even without a searc…

Unfortunately (according to Wikipedia) like DuckDuckGo, also Qwant is mainly a meta search engine, meaning the are using Bing & Yandex and have only a small scale own web crawler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism

Sponsored by European Union, France and a Germany and dubbed as Google clone a few years ago is "Exalead", a real large scale web search engine. Unfortunately it got bought by Daussault (Catia 3D CAD), but it's still online and works:

https://www.exalead.com/search/

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#79

Post by kakarot »

sewer_bird wrote: post #76
kakarot wrote: post #53

The main thing I like about this service is the looks. It's mostly sleek and refreshingly minimal with a colorful and expressive logo to boot, a la Google. DDG on the other hand... while I love the idea and would love to use it more often, not only gives poor results for most of my searches but the heavy use of red literally gives me a physical anxiety that makes it basically unusable. I could style the page myself b…

DGG has about as much red on it as Hacker News: is it such a heavy use of color? At least on desktop in Safari, the site is pretty 'white', and I'm surprised you get literal physical anxiety.

Interesting! Last time I used the service, about 3-4 months ago, the search results page was awash in red. Now it seems that the style has been much improved to the point of usability. I don't get anxiety like before. FWIW I was/am using Firefox on both Fedora and Windows.

How long has DDG had its current look for you?

Re: Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy

#80

Post by Faaak »

Sadly, the search engine reports many duplicate results. For example, I searched: "arid land reforestation", and results were (https://screenshots.firefox.com/wl6JuVa5sbWNgy2o/www.qwant.c...):

* 1st: http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...

* 2nd: http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...

* 4th: http://maestron.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...

* 5th: http://pipcoins.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...

etc, etc. All of which were "bad" websites. It's a shame because some good results (science direct, …) were inside the lot. The content isn't even a pdf.

You should implement a "unique" webpage result fingerprint in order to avoid showing duplicates (well, I suppose it's easier said than done..).

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