
Qwant – An alternative to Google - _j4jc
https://www.qwant.com/
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631473](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631473)

~~~
reitanqild
I can't remember having seen it before and was really happy to see it.

Do we have to call it a dupe whrn it's 10 months old and still super
interesting?

~~~
dang
The cutoff is about a year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

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jamesgeck0
It loads much slower than Google or DDG for me. The search bar jumps up and
down the page as the huge animated logo loads. Then when you click the search
bar, it jumps to the top of the page again. It's not a great UX.

Qwant Lite ([https://lite.qwant.com/](https://lite.qwant.com/)) loads much
faster initially and the UI doesn't jump around, but it's slower to load
search results. It also features the objectively false tagline, "The only
search engine that respects your privacy."

I think I'll stick with DuckDuckGo, thanks.

~~~
jmcomets
Qwant is based in France, so I suspect the issue is their servers' location.
For me it loads just as fast as Google & DDG.

I have a old schoolmate working there who's always been genuinely interested
in protecting other people's privacy. To me that tagline is just sleazy
marketing.

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dsl
I remember a conversation I had with an engineer working on Bing around the
time of the Microsoft/Yahoo deal... their core metric was the number of
searches where they matched 8 out of 10 or more of Google's results on the
first page of the search.

Qwant isn't even that close. The results are absolutely poor across a number
of different queries.

~~~
zeugmasyllepsis
In some sense that's kind of the point right? If Qwant isn't tracking user
information than we _expect_ the results to be different, since the engine
doesn't have a chance to build up an information bubble about its users.

~~~
dsl
> If Qwant isn't tracking user information than we _expect_ the results to be
> different

We expect the answers to be _correct_. Google can use everything it knows
about me to turn an abstract term like "giants" into SF Giants or New York
Giants, but when I explicitly enter "san francisco giants" as part of a query
and still get poor results, that is a failure.

~~~
gleenn
If 2 pages have similar topics and coverage, and 1 is ranked higher on Google
and the other higher on Qwant, who is "correct"? Search is a fuzzy thing, and
while some results might be objectively, I challenge your notion of
correctness.

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dang
"Show HN" is for something you've made. Since this site has been posted many
times before, I'm assuming that's not the case and have taken "Show HN" out of
the title above. Please read the rules:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

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zmmille2
My first load it took 3 clicks to hit the search bar as new images and links
loaded under the cursor.

~~~
metalliqaz
THIS.

I don't know if there is a name for this kind of user-hostile behavior, but I
wish more people paid attention to it.

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citilife
Sure it provides search results that seem fine - but why use this over
duckduckgo?

I also really don't like the lack of data density. The news doesn't make any
sense in most cases.

~~~
c487bd62
> but why use this over duckduckgo?

If history showed us anything is that we need a lot of competition in this
area

~~~
godelski
I'm guessing the parent is asking "what's their Qwant's edge?". Competition
isn't only providing the same product. Usually one will have a certain edge or
do something another doesn't. DDG's edge is privacy. Qwant's edge is...
European? Does that make a difference?

~~~
c487bd62
I got that, I think it's important to support competitors in this space even
if they don't have an edge (yet?). At the very least they get some feedback
and data to improve their core. Maybe one of them will find new revenue models
that aren't prone to abuse or corruption. Honestly I think Google only got
worse in the last few years for me, e.g. certain search operators getting
ignored or not working as they used to, image search completely broken and
screwed by pinterest & co. I'm now forced to use several search engines to
limit the context I used to get for free.

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hamslamwich
The "X" icon in the "Switch to Qwant" popup on the right side doesn't work,
meaning I can't close that box. (desktop Chrome 68.0.3)

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craigsmansion
[https://lite.qwant.com/](https://lite.qwant.com/)

is a more familiar (and in my opinion, better) interface.

~~~
overcast
This should be the default instead of that other mess that looks like the Digg
landing page.

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garmaine
This will offend most graphic designers out there, but could you make the
landing and search results page a _simple_ and bare bones as possible, with no
javascript, no animations, and no dynamic loading of content?

I think the thing you should be targeting here is getting the website and
initial results to load in a single TCP packet. Because right now it doesn't
_feel_ like google. It feels like bing. (Except that somehow bing loads faster
than qwant, maybe due to better CDS?)

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LoSboccacc
"don't use cookies"

if you go in local storage there's a suspicious h_user with a numeric id

sure it's not technically a cookie, but still..

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ww520
It actually is not bad. I did couple searches. All came up fine. The results
are relevant.

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sofaofthedamned
TBF I read the comments here and didn't expect much but it's not that bad.

No delay, and a search for 'kubernetes' brought up kubernetes.io at the top of
the listings bar the top bit with the 'freshness' thing, which I don't
understand tbf.

Second search for 'kubernetes ingress' brought up the kubernetes.io concepts
page for ingress - which is better than what I get from Google occasionally,
which is the actual doc page for 3 versions ago.

From this cursory search it isn't that bad. I generally swerve towards Google
on most things, but this has been a better experience than DDG or Bing for me.

~~~
sofaofthedamned
Out of interest have they got their own crawler, or is this a new one? I've
not seen anything notably new in my logs recently.

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keb_
Tried searching for my own Steam Community profile, and it gave me
pornography. I've had similar experiences with DuckDuckGo. As much as I'd like
to switch from Google, there really is no better alternative.

~~~
fcarraldo
I have to ask: is this a case of the search engine being at fault, or the
search terminology being problematic? I use DDG as my primary search and I've
never accidentally received pornography.

~~~
keb_
My username is just my middlename plus an underscore. It's not a common
username at all. I've tried this on multiple computers, different browsers,
after clearing cookies & cache.

I believe it's the searchengine. There is no reason why the query,
'steamcommunity <my_username_here>' shouldn't return my profile. And after
investigating the porn links, I don't see why Qwant would direct me there.

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losvedir
I can't tell from a quick perusal: does it do its own crawling and manage its
own index? Or is it more like DDG, just using Bing, Yandex, etc?

~~~
jorams
This help center entry[1] suggests it's a combination of their own crawlers
and Bing.

[1]: [https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-
th...](https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-the-web/)

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Razengan
I've always wondered: Why not incorporate search into fundamental internet
architecture, like DNS?

Web servers could index everything they serve, and clients could use a
standardized protocol to query their neighbors (and their neighbors and so on)
to look for all instances of a phrase or image.

Throw in some distributed machine learning into the mix to make everything
sound cutting-edge.

~~~
dividuum
You'll have spammers 1 minute after something like this goes live. A search
engine isn't only about finding things with your key word in it. It's also
about rejecting low quality content you're probably not interested in. The
former is the easier job. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall)

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Semaphor
If any competitor wants me to switch from DDG, I need a bang replacement. You
are not Google. Everyone knows it and no one expects the same quality of
results.

If you don't give me an easy option to switch to google or something similar
or tell you where exactly to look for results, you are not an option (for me)

~~~
l9k
Qwant has bangs, called Qwick:

[https://help.qwant.com/help/qwant-search/searching/how-
use-q...](https://help.qwant.com/help/qwant-search/searching/how-use-qwick/)

~~~
Semaphor
Awesome, I'll try it out :)

They should really make those more visible :)

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arihant
Very primitive. Does not work with most high frequency n-grams, and I tried a
bunch from the top 5K. "Best hacker fare website" does not highlight "fares"
in titles, "hacker fare" is not detected as a phase, so I get basically
gibberish.

~~~
fenwick67
To be fair, I, as a human, do not know what a "hacker fare website" is.

~~~
arihant
But Google does. The first link on Google explains what they are.

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hjek
This does look interesting, but I do wish you'd publish more code. Currently
this seems to follow the same model as DuckDuckGo by publishing a few bits[0],
like Instant Answers, but leaving the main code non-free, rather than, say,
Searx[1] that's fully free.

Without that, I don't see Qwant as something that distinguishes itself from
other search engine companies, and is not something I'd recommend to anyone.

Also, I think you should perhaps reconsider whether it's a good idea to have
Donald Trumps face on your front page, no?

[0]: [https://github.com/qwant](https://github.com/qwant)

[1]: [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

~~~
dmos62
I hadn't heard about searx before. It's great. I've been a long time startpage
user. Searx is built in a similar spirit, but better in all aspects, or at
least those I care about.

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sdinsn
It took ~20 seconds for the page to load...

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jvagner
looks like av.com of years ago.

main interface is horrible, not gonna default to "lite" just to use a thing.

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some_account
I was using this but it didn't work well. They seem to have some performance
issues when you search often, like 5 times in a minute and stuff like that.

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progfix
I sure like the search result settings (lanugage and search results for which
country), but it doesn't show nudes in the image results. My theory is that a
search engine that doesn't show nudes on default, will not be able to gain
wide spread usage.

