As a French I don’t recommend Qwant
- Lies of the management team
- Use Azure services (especially for the search index) rather than OVH services (for a service that claims a certain European sovereignty it’s not great…)
- Bad search results
My last try was several years ago, maybe it has changed-
wow you are spot on! how can they claim any form of user respect while using azure
Lies of management team? Can you elaborate? Interested in hearing, as Qwant used to be great for research until they blocked it on their end for India.
The cool thing about qwant is that is there it’s own crawlers and technology to search and not just take search results from other search engines.
Is qwant really private ? Hopefully.
According to this article their results are still largely based on bing’s: https://lemmy.ml/post/30520
What I said is according to the qwant article on Wikipedia. If I find a link from the official company, I will post it here.
deleted by creator
it’s an alternative.
not a great one.
the results aren’t that great.
and i caught them trying to track my clicks.it’s optimized for french, also works for english but it’s not ideal
And Startpage?
Is startpage better?
Nobody is talking about how for some mysterious reason, they chose to make it unavailable for a lot of countries this month? India, Singapore, Brazil, Nepal, Indonesia, Kenya and so on…
I need to use a VPN everytime to use Qwant, and so my usage of it has dropped drastically, even though DuckDuckGo is available via good DNS (even that is blocked on some ISPs).
They show ads from Microsoft, the question is how far the algorithms are involved with these types of ads?
I have adblocker so i dont care. Also, QwantLite has no JS.
Sure.
deleted by creator
I used to for some time. I have no scientific proof, but it didn’t provide good results compared to other search engines.
The results are quite good but the normal version is painfully slow imo. Qwant lite on the other hand feels really snappy but it’s not really user friendly to show a 500 if no results are found. Also the lite version does not link its results directly but through some sort of tracking URI(?). Another not so nice thing is that qwant is owned for 20% by Axel Springer SE which is a publishing house for Fox News-like media such as Bild and Welt.
I use it for quite some time and am happy with it. I have not noticed bad search results but also have not compared really. I general I have found what I was looking for.
last time I tried their search page was very javascript heavy. results were kindof meh but I used it for a couple of months then the slow speed started becoming annoying so I stopped using it. Around the same time, I was trying Ecosia as well, trying out the European search engines, because of their privacy stance.
But they got annoying and Qwant (afaicr) even started showing captcha. I don’t even search that much. Ecosia didn’t implement a dark interface. not that important but kinda blinding during night. So left them both for searx
Qwant doesn’t accept my IP. I hear from many users that it’s blocked in their location. When I was able to use it a couple of years back, the search results were poor. Especially on long tail keywords.
I’m now using Presearch, which is private and Web3. Works awesome, even better than Google.
