Qwant

If you live in the Western world, Google dominates the internet, search included. There's a huge amount wrong with Google, from its compliance with totalitarian censorship, to the fact it profits at the expense of users' privacy, its tax-avoidance, filter bubbling, and much, much else besides. I hate to point out the obvious at this point, but you'll notice that genuinely all of these directly affect important aspects of democracy. Sorry: That's not me, it's just that information, taxes and privacy are inherently at the core of democracy.

Qwant is a comparatively new search engine which promises not to leverage your privacy to profit. It doesn't - as Google does - compile your searches, catalogue your interests, cross-reference your website visits (to say nothing of email contents, youtube views, bookmarks, contacts, phone apps and everything you've done on Chrome). Nor does Qwant leverage all this information to build up a profile of you as an individual, as Google does. Nor does it use that information for its own profit. You might remind yourself of historical examples where an organization has compiled profiles of individuals for its own benefit. And how those organizations related to democracy.

For going against that trend Qwant deserves a modicum of merit, wouldn't you agree?

So what should I say? That its search is better than Google's? No. But it's near-equal. Damn-near equal. So what price your privacy? What price do you put on the freedom to search, to not be bubbled, to not be profiled as a matter of routine?

And if you don't like Qwant, let me break it to you gently: Bing (see here) and Yahoo search (see here) will not help. Privacy conscious alternatives are:

• Startpage (looks crappy, but searches well... and that's because it proxies your requests to Google. Google results, no privacy violation.)
• DuckDuckGo (a privacy-respecting search engine. Read more here.)
• SearX (a meta search-engine: it gathers results from other search engines and present it to you without revealing to them what you're asking)
• Disconnect.me (another way of getting results without revealing who you are)

One more thing:
If privacy considerations of this sort are new to you, know that many alternatives exist to the convenience you've been sold by Google. It just takes time to research them and learn why it's important. You can do worse than by starting with www.privacytools.io and advice from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a US non-profit organization advising the public). Don't go thinking that Chrome and Facebook are necessities (or even desirable). You don't have to have every thought and message catalogued by Gmail for their benefit. Ask yourself why things you use are "free". (The answer is because they are using you, in case you're in doubt.)

Qwant is fast & has great results plus respects user privacy, It has qwicks ( that are reminscent to Duckduckgo's bangs) & doesn't track you, unlike evil Google.

[Edited by jakubabayomitsimbukondo, September 24]

Qwant is nice project on paper, but behind it's just another pump for public subsidies, which only owes its longevity to the relations of Qwant's shareholders and managers with personalities at the highest level of the State, including Emanuel Macron.

Qwant wants to present itself as the "sovereign" search engine for France, but more than 60% of its results depend on Microsoft's Bing and there are mostly dated, unreliable, irrelevant and limited in number, which of course leads us to think how very difficult it is to create a search engine. Qwant is not ready, not only is it not ready, but the problem that Qwant has not stopped wanting to develop other projects while its main project, namely the search engine, is already working badly, they should review what the priorities are.

The only thing Qwant does well is to protect the privacy of its users, except that other search engines do it too and they don't receive public funding.

All of sudden Qwant is not serving searches anymore from Indonesia. 14 December 2020, 17.38

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Relatively good, fast and acceptable results. But there are some pain points:

• Very specialized searches on software engineering topics usually return poor results compared with Google and DuckDuckGo.
• It's not able to find information on very recent events (definitely nothing on the same day), if you are lucky, one or two days after you will be able to find related information.

I just learned about open source Quant Maps (beta) which doesn't track - which seems unusually cool, unlike google.

French, Full of useful features, but most importantly, privacy focused !
What more do you want ?