
Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy - kome
https://about.qwant.com/
======
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](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.

~~~
myf01d
> 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.

I genuinely don't understand this hostile statement. Why do you complain that
a website isn't functional in pure html in 2017? do you want the web to look
like it's 1998?

~~~
Annatar
Because a search engine must run on the widest array of web browsers possible.
For being a European search engine and based in France to boot, they should
very well be aware of platforms which have minimal or no JavaScript support in
their web browsers, like for example the classic AmigaOS. If someone with a
platform like that tries to use their search engine to perhaps find a
JavaScript enabled client, they couldn’t. Lots of TV sets nowadays have built-
in web browsers with no or incomplete JavaScript support, as another example.

However the worst offense is that JavaScript is utterly unnecessary in a web
search application, so that would be introducing an artificial dependency, one
of the worst crimes in software development. Software should be designed with
minimal dependencies it needs to do the job and the extras should be the
users’ choice. Developers who made this choice for users historically lost
their user base as soon as a competing application which had less dependencies
showed up; there is a lesson to be learned from that.

~~~
m_t
> For being a European search engine and based in France to boot, they should
> very well be aware of platforms which have minimal or no JavaScript support
> in their web browsers,

I don't understand this statement. Is there less js-enabled browser in Europe,
or in France?

~~~
Annatar
Commodore Amiga and ATARI ST were big in France (and still are, if the
demoscene contributions are anything to go by); In Europe, Amiga is still a
thing. ATARI ST is still a thing. Neither of those have complete JavaScript
support, if any. That’s where “the French connection” comes from in this
context.

------
5kyn3t
I think it is great news. Europe is so much behind the US in the IT-Sector.
Even russia has a successful search-engine.

The default view is a bit overloaded in my opinion...

Lite version: [https://lite.qwant.com/](https://lite.qwant.com/)

A plus point is that qwant also supports hashbangs like duckduckgo.

~~~
Annatar
_Europe is so much behind the US in the IT-Sector._

Isn’t that a sad truth, only made worse by the irony that a lot of us went to
work in the States. A lot of Europe is still conceptually stuck in the pre-
UNIX, lone desktop Windows/MS-DOS, early ’90’s era, while the rest of the
world runs them by with macOS PC’s and iPads. Lots of European UNIX talent
left for the States right at the cusp of the dot-com era and helped build the
Internet because that’s where all the action was. We never really recovered
from that.

~~~
everyone
"A lot of Europe is still conceptually stuck in the pre-UNIX, lone desktop
Windows/MS-DOS, early ’90’s era" So Europe is stuck in the 90's which somehow
predates the 70's ??

..

"while the rest of the world runs them by with macOS PC’s and iPads" Buying
istuff is somehow progressive?

~~~
Annatar
You betcha: that stuff runs UNIX, doesn’t disrupt one’s concentration with
modal windows and runs circles around Windows desktops performance-wise. For
most people an iPad and web applications are apparently enough, which means
they don’t need or want a Windows desktop PC any more.

The early ‘90’s computing paradigm with a lone desktop PC user and application
isn’t cutting it any more. At the very least, one good thing came out of
change.

~~~
everyone
"that stuff runs UNIX" osx and ios have an very old UNIX legacy but as they
currently stand are extremely restrictive walled gardens completey controlled
by a single giant avaricious corporation. If you were true to your ideas you'd
be running Linux which is open, open source and btw is most popular in Europe,
eg. being the OS used by the public sector in Germany. "doesn’t disrupt one’s
concentration with modal windows" What? please give an example. Linux's UI can
be configured however u want. "and runs circles around Windows desktops
performance-wise" That is just nonsensical. To talk about performance you need
to be comparing 2 specific things. Which things are you talking about? As an
example, heres two things I'm comparing; For fun once at work we compared
benchmarks between two new laptops each costing about €1400. My colleague had
a macbook pro, I had a msi gs60. My laptop scored about 3 times as much in cpu
performance and 5 times as much in a unigine valley graphics becnchmark. "The
early ‘90’s computing paradigm with a lone desktop PC user and application
isn’t cutting it any more" Sure things are going that way, but if you think
most users are ready to do everything via web-apps now then u are living in a
very rarefied bubble. photoshop, autocad, 3dsmax, ableton, an endless list of
specialised, high performance demand, software for professionals, theres a
long way to go before that kind of thing can run in a browser. Also how is iOS
os OSX somehow more web-app friendly? Youre much more restricted on them on
what browser you can run and how u can configure it than on linux or even
windows. html5 canvas doesnt even work properly on iOS.

~~~
Annatar
_If you were true to your ideas you 'd be running Linux_

I would rather drop dead. I’m a UNIX guy, Solaris guy to be precise and that
means illumos and SmartOS in particular. I value stability, formal
specifications, the ability to introspect the system, a system which can self
heal and is paranoid about correctness of operation and data. A system which
is always engineered to be backwards compatible. Exactly everything that
SmartOS is and GNU/Linux isn’t! illumos and SmartOS are using CDDL which is by
and large less restrictive than the GPL, so GNU/Linux stands for everything I
fight against. There are no words in any of the languages I speak which can
express my hate of GNU and GNU/Linux.

As for macOS and iOS, I don’t care about open because I neither intend nor
want to tinker with it: I want to pay, bring home, turn on and use. As long as
all the hardware works, the thing is responsive and I have xterm and ssh to
log into my SmartOS datacenter, I’m good to go. Not going to waste my life
with GNU/Linux, I do that too much at work aleady. Simply not going to happen.

What I mean by responsiveness is that my 2013 MacBook Air is usable
instantaneously while my barely a year old work laptop with Windows 7 needs
half an hour to get to the point where it is able to launch an application.
Then I launch it, but since it has other apps starting in the background as
I’m working they keep popping up their windows and taking the focus away,
interrupting my thought and workflow. A macOS app will never appropriate the
focus, nor will subwindows be modal, forcing me to close them first if I want
to get at the data in the main window. Windows is just crap.

------
lawl
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](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings)

from what I've tried this seems to work even without a search history on
google. I've tried this across different cookieless browsers and IP's. Google
just seems to get it.

This seems to return (almost) the exact same shit as bing on Qwant. So I do
not see how this is an improvement over bing/ddg/whatever.

Man I'd love to get rid of google in my personal life, but... for my searches
nobody else seems to perform. Google just seems to know what I want to search,
even if I don't have a search history on that machine.

Edit: For searches in german it seems to perform similarily shitty to bing. Do
they get search results from bing?

~~~
Iv
The thing is, Google improves its results THANKS to its privacy invasion.

To understand "poe" as path of exile, it helps to know that you at least once
searched for path of exile. After it has seen a few hundreds users do that, it
will make the connection.

To know that "poe shavs" refers to the game and not Edgar Alan Poe, it
probably had to provide a link to a relevant author's name and to the game's
page and watch which links people would more likely click.

There is a chicken and egg here. People want a search engine that can read
their minds without invading their privacy, that's a hard problem.

~~~
nottorp
This privacy invasion is a two edged sword too. Google is getting very good at
searching for stuff you use daily, especially if it's gaming or some other
media in fashion.

However, it's becoming useless for infrequent searches. Try googling any
random error message and notice 90% of the results don't even contain it.

~~~
carvalho
Can you give an example of a random error message where the results do not
match?

~~~
Annatar
Try to compile some software, if you get a compile error paste the generic
portion into Google and watch it become completely useless.

~~~
carvalho
Thanks, but can you please give a specific example?

One, I do not share this experience, and think the quality issue is overstated
(you are more likely to remember the time that a query failed, than when it
succeeded).

Two, if you can produce a POC, Google can use this to improve the search
results.

As is, the issue brought up by original poster is too vague and unspecified to
be of any use.

~~~
nottorp
Dude, you're treating it like a bug. It's not. It's intentional behaviour that
started 2-3 years ago. Instead of giving you just the formerly relevant
results, they give you all kinds of crap that they _think_ you are interested
in.

You can still revert to the original behaviour by selecting 'Verbatim' from
the search tools menu, but you cannot make it default. And in time I'm sure
some marketing head will remove even that option.

Edit: and if you never experience it, my guess is you're working with some
technology that's "in fashion".

~~~
carvalho
Maybe I never experienced it, because if I want to force exact match results I
simply place the error message within double quotes. But often you do not need
exact match searches to get good results for a random error message. If it
happens to you a lot, it should not be a problem to post a single example
query that returns useless results.

I do agree that Google is focusing more and more on the common internet user,
and not the early tech adopters. This forces us to use tricks like the double
quotes, while keeping the search engine user-friendly for the vast majority of
ad-clicking internetters.

The behavior you are referring to is called
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_expansion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_expansion)
and while this improves the search results for many people with imprecise or
misspelled queries, if you trained yourself to search with exact matches,
you'll need some time to adapt (or get in the habbit of adding double quotes).

~~~
Annatar
_Maybe I never experienced it, because if I want to force exact match results
I simply place the error message within double quotes._

Come on!!! This is not my first rodeo. I’ve been on the InterNet (yes, with a
capital N) since 1993 and I use double quote searching all the time, except
that in cases like these one gets zero results back.

~~~
carvalho
It is not relevant that you were on the internet before Google even existed.

Apparently you are the only person in the universe that regularly gets never-
before-seen error messages. I feel for you, but I hope you stay away from any
issue tracker I am involved in, because no matter your vast experience, the
quality of your error reporting is downright poor.

If exact match search is unable to find your error message, then you wouldn't
have found it on 2005 Google either. You wouldn't find it on any other search
engine. You are (poorly and vaguely) describing a problem that must have
always been there and blaming it on an unrelated recent UI change.

All the while unable/unwilling to give a single concrete example, just noisy
ranting. For all I know you are, despite your experience, banging your head
against the keyboard, until you get 0 results. The burden is on you to show
that there is a teapot orbiting the Sun. Good luck!

~~~
Annatar
_It is not relevant that you were on the internet before Google even existed._

That’s where you’re wrong: I’ve used the double quotation marks search
technique since before Google and I’ve known about it and used it since
Google’s debut.

I already told you I’m not compiling anything and can’t give you a
reproducible test case right now but you chose to disregard that; I’ve also
told you what to do to reproduce the problem yourself (“attempt to compile
GCC, get an error, search with Google with and without double quotation
marks”), but you don’t want to do that because it’s a lot of work, I know, but
that’s your problem and here’s why:

 _The burden is on you to show that there is a teapot orbiting the Sun._

that is why, since you’re wrong again: I’ve switched to “DuckDuckGo” as my
primary search engine and rarely use Google any more since the results are
nothing but advertising-soiled false positives; I don’t care whether you do
something about it or not. Now, you might wisen up and take my feedback about
exact or partial error searching earnestly or not. You wanted feedback, you
got it; your move on what to do about it. Good luck.

------
lukeqsee
I'm not seeing any advantage over duckduckgo.com.

I want a search engine that loads quickly and gives good results, DDG does
that while protecting my privacy.

~~~
beefsack
Do you remember DDG five years ago? Everyone needs to start somewhere.

One potential advantage is it's run out of Europe instead of the US, which is
significant for certain people.

~~~
djsumdog
Exactly. I still use !g with DDG if I can't find something; but 1/3 of the
time DDG works just fine.

Back in the day you'd go to Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, et. al. and you'd get
different results! There was a difference with search engines that would leads
you to all kinds of interesting stuff. Today it's all monolithic. It's going
to be either indexed by Google or on some mega walled garden like
FB/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.

We need more alternative search engines. I personally stopped using the verb
"Googled" and try to say "Searched for" instead. The world needs to be more
than just Google.

------
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...](https://screenshots.firefox.com/wl6JuVa5sbWNgy2o/www.qwant.com)):

* 1st: [http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...](http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf)

* 2nd: [http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...](http://haringey.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf)

* 4th: [http://maestron.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...](http://maestron.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf)

* 5th: [http://pipcoins.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid...](http://pipcoins.store/reforestation/in/reforestation_in_arid_lands.pdf)

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..).

------
ACow_Adonis
I actually like its theme stylistically more than I like DDG.

A couple of points of feedback though:

\- When I go through the lite version (which should almost be the default), if
I image search, clicking on the results takes me to the webpage that the image
is on, not the image itself. If i wanted that I wouldn't be doing an image
search.

\- There's an "install qwant" button in the top right hand of the screen. I'm
not clear what i'd be installing if i clicked on that, or why i should need or
want to install anything to use a search engine?

\- I've gotten two separate front-pages when visiting www.qwant.com on
desktop. One is a semi-minimalist page, a bit more complicated than the lite
version, but quite nice and clean. If this was the default i'd be happy. The
second was a version more reminiscent of the old "yahoo" type setup, with news
and stories and random stuff splattered everywhere below the search bar.
Subjectively, the second one needs to die. However, i'm not sure why its no
longer turning up for me (even though I'm glad it isn't). I certainly haven't
saved my account, nor am i consciously using a remembered URL.

\- I got a captcha type thing popping up saying there'd been a lot of activity
from my location. I'm pretty sure I'm not currently behind my VPN, so that
seemed weird for me to be seeing such...

\- On mobile, that just took WAY too long to open. Almost 10 seconds. As
others have mentioned, you need to eliminate half the crap and make the rest
more responsive. I don't go to search engine to view tabloid stories (or if i
did, i'd search for them), i'm there to search.

\- Its not entirely clear why it seems that the links on the lite page are
redirects, but the links on the main page appear to be direct? Is that
deliberate? A bug? Obviously one would prefer them all to be direct.

\- Don't know what's going on, it appeared to me subjectively that the main
page was picking up successfully that I was from Australia. However, during
one of my searches using the lite page, the options up the top of "web, news,
social", etc looked like they were in another language (looked dutch-ish to
me).

------
doesnt_know
60 requests, Loaded in 6.49s. Cripes, if you don't have some marketing
department shoving tracking scripts all over the place against your will
what's your excuse?

~~~
starik36
I got a question from our marketing department why it takes a while for our
website to load just the other day. My answer was exactly what you mentioned -
forcing us to include tracking scripts from google analytics, tag manager,
oracle maximizer, segment, facebook, doubleclick and a handful of other
monstrosities that do god only knows what on startup.

~~~
anigbrowl
Prediction: no change will take place because someone else will say 'without
that data, we're flying blind.'

------
pmontra
I'll try to use it but those news on the search page... I'm there to search,
not to read news.

There is an addon for Firefox to use it as a search engine:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-
fir...](https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-firefox/)

~~~
eveningcoffee
It was possible to close and turn off the news panels and it is possible to
see only web results (by clicking on the left panel). This choice is
unfortunately not remembered.

~~~
peoplewindow
The downside of being "cookie free" \- instant forgetting of your preferences.

~~~
llukas
Not really - it seems that you can set your settings and get url that
remembers them.

"If you haven't created a Qwant account to save your settings, you can use the
following link as a homepage or drag it into your bookmarks:
[https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&h=0&hc=1&a=1&s=1&b=1&i=1&r=US&sr...](https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&h=0&hc=1&a=1&s=1&b=1&i=1&r=US&sr=en")

~~~
mwbnoe0n2nt
Well that's nice and all, but how is a typical user supposed to find and
understand that? (Also drag it into your bookmarks? I don't know a single user
who will understand that that's a thing.)

------
anigbrowl
It's OK, reasonably fast, and I do like the interface, but search results as a
list is so 1990s. Give me the result as a DAG. Give me sort options. Let me
pin a result and then iterate in relation to it.

 _Show me something different,_ not the same thing as everyone else with a
promise about my privacy and some different graphical sugar. To beat the
established competitors you don't need to be incrementally better, you need to
be qualitatively different.

I do prefer it DDG, at least for desktop use, because it's actually using the
whole of my screen for a change. But wow me with something. I haven't had that
in a while.

------
m12k
I don't want privacy to be a parameter that companies compete on, I want to
government to enforce something sane that all the companies will then have to
follow. Imagine if there were '50% less lead than our competitors' labels on
food products.

------
a_imho
I never understand log in on a search engine. I'm supplying keywords to search
for, please don't try to profile and put me in a bubble.

After like 2 searches I got:

 _A high amount of connections have been detected from your location and you
have been blocked.Please, validate the anti-robot below to be allowed access
to the website._

~~~
5kyn3t
I got the same notification

------
pjmlp
> [https://about.qwant.com/job/ninja/](https://about.qwant.com/job/ninja/)

What a disappointment, I was expecting some job requirements regarding the
handling of shuriken, nunchakus, sword fighting, art of camouflage, ...

Ah, and something like the graduation note of Shaolin Temple, in case of
attendance.

------
MichaelMoser123
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?

~~~
captainmuon
This is an important question, I was wondering the same for very long with
DDG. The answer seems to be ads, like everybody else:

[https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-
mon...](https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-make-money/)

~~~
vagnes
They say: "When you use Qwant, no personal information whatsoever is neither
captured or transmitted to advertisers.", but then they also say: "We believe
we now have designed a simple and efficient offering by working with the
Microsoft Bing ad network."

Is it just me, or are these two statements oxymorons?

~~~
captainmuon
They probably say "give me some ads for keyword 'react js'" and don't pass on
your IP or other identifying info.

Still a problem if you search for your own name, but I don't think you can do
much about that. Or maybe MS provides a bloom table / index of all keywords
they currenty have ads for, so you can check "offline" before sending it to
them?

------
pmoriarty
I can't view the page either with emacs-w3m nor with w3m itself.

So that's one thing that DDG has over Qwant for me: it works with my browsers.

~~~
256
Have you tried lite.qwant.com? It's pretty usable for me in w3m, although
still not as nice as DDG.

~~~
pmoriarty
Thanks. lite.qwant.com seems to work.

Now I have to find a way to make it not give me indirect links like:

[https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/IDSLFJKsdf99wejweiDFISDJFL92...](https://lite.qwant.com/redirect/IDSLFJKsdf99wejweiDFISDJFL929w9ejfsdifdsjli=/https://en.wikipedia.org/)

But give me direct links instead, like:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/](https://en.wikipedia.org/)

On DDG this can be done by appending &kd=-1 to the URL.

------
Symbiote
Filtering by page language would be useful. Half of my results for a search
query of a scientific term were the Wikipedia pages in other languages.

------
rollo
I'm really liking it so far. I was able to find some obscure stuff that google
failed me on with image search, using rather ridiculous queries. A few random
searches also returned more relevant results on the first page. Will
definitely keep using it for a while to see if this keeps up.

------
gerdesj
So where is the bloody product? The silly little link on the about site is
easy to miss.

Quite like it on first use. I've been meaning to ditch Google (can't be arsed
with "do do no evil" anymore) for a while now and this looks like a good
start.

~~~
gerdesj
I'm now close to convinced but the domain is .com - fair enough for world use
but this sells itself as an EU based affair. Be who you are (says the MD of a
UK company with a .net email address!)

I genuinely hope this works as advertised but I am having a bloody hard time
finding out what is behind the scenes from the about website.

I will stick with it because their advertised basic premise strikes a note
with me.

~~~
gerdesj
I simply fired up Firefox and searched (probably via G) for "quanta" and got a
pretty severe Google notice.

Now I know what I am going to do. Bye Google - I was a customer for around 20
years.

I'm off.

~~~
jsnell
What exactly do you mean by "a pretty severe Google notice"?

------
themihai
Nice, but I want an open source one with open datasets so that I know for sure
what they are storing and eventually allow others to develop alternative
engines. Nevertheless some competition in the search engine world is never
bad.

~~~
mstef
you should have a look at searx instead, is also from the eu, and is
completely free software, so free, that you as a user can demand the source
code of the instance running due to the agpl license.

~~~
bobajeff
I like searx myself. To bad I can't get the search suggestions to work in the
address bar. Also, I wish there was an app to run it off of your phone. It
would be nice to not have to use a public instance.

------
georgeglue1
many privacy search engines like duckduckgo really just query bing or google
(sometimes through a proxy)...

any idea if qwant does this?

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

Although they just show Bing results for me so don't know how much of their
own index is actually used.

~~~
cJ0th
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism)

------
throw2016
Too busy design wise at the moment and lacking back end details but the
results seem decent at first glance.

No one can deny competition in search is desperately needed. Without that
Google inevitably becomes more emboldened and seeks to further normalize and
expand their creepy behavior.

An approach for a new engine should be both privacy which is a strong message
that will resonate and also the technical details so people don't just assume
its consuming another backend. That's what will make it interesting.

------
jondubois
That's nice but it needs better support for indexing JavaScript single page
apps. Right now only Google seems to be doing it properly.

~~~
flukus
That sounds like a feature, punishing poorly made "apps" that require
javascript.

~~~
Sir_Substance
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, I'd use the shit out of a search engine
that was optimized for sites that don't use javascript for basic
functionality.

------
mfukar
I might try it again sometime in the future, when it doesn't take more than 5
seconds to get a result to a query.

------
slezyr
Not sure how it "social" search works, but it gives me a bunch russian bots,
when I search "ukraine"

[https://www.qwant.com/?q=%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%B...](https://www.qwant.com/?q=%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0&t=all)

------
fulafel
How is the privacy assurance of this vs DDG? What are the promises and does
either proide more than promises?

------
cinquemb
Idk, not to disparage services like these, I'm sure they can be valuable to
some degree from some threat actors, But I think on a personal level, one
would think that the user should take a more adversarial role to protect their
privacy rather to rely on Bottled Privacy™.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
“Why Don’t We Have Both?” is a meme for a reason :P

~~~
cinquemb
Well at least for me, I'll wait for a non JS endpoint before trying some of
this…

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gator-io
We track usage share of search engines. We do not have Qwant detection at this
point, but what I can see:

\- Out of 7972 sites, 561 have received at least one referral from Qwant.

We will need to explore this further to get usable numbers.

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leke
Looks promising, but my initial searching for Dart lang didn't return any
results in News and Social, and unrelated images in the Images search.

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kakarot
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 but they really need to consider losing the red
in favor of green or purple or gold because I can't be the only one who
experiences this.

~~~
sewer_bird
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.

~~~
kakarot
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?

~~~
sewer_bird
I think I switched to DDG perhaps 5 months ago, although I'm not sure. Happy
ducking, hah!

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eveningcoffee
Image results is using either too big or too low resolution images that are
irritating to look at.

Could be solved by making images smaller or increasing resolution.

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dna_polymerase
I just did 3 searches on there and 2 times I got a server error. I will try
Qwant now as default, but it already feels bad.

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Marc66FR
Been using qwant since it came out and I never looked back: great UI and
search results

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Zhenya
Won't even load the search input field without javascript...

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dingo_bat
Will they censor results like EU has been forcing Google to do?

~~~
C14L
You mean, follow the law? Yes. Shocking, isn't it?

~~~
briandear
So people seem to want a privacy-protecting search engine that provides
censored results based on the whims of governments. Ok, that is logical. Did a
single person in the EU willingly vote for a censored web?

Does anyone actually want the government of France Germany or Turkey deciding
what websites you are allowed to visit?

Why not put all the servers in a location that actually respects freedom and
not censor anything AND not track us? That would be something I would be
interested in. The whole concept of geo-restricted anything is a ridiculous
antithesis to what the internet is supposed to be.

~~~
jcbrand
Turkey is not part of the EU.

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jk2323
Do they run their own crawling server or do they "repack" search request to
google like DDG, Startpage or ixquick?

If they do it from scratch, kudos.

