Qwant

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Qwant
Website logo
Search engine
languages 28
operator QWANT SAS
Registration optional
Annual income 5 million euros
On-line 2013
https://www.qwant.com/

Qwant is a search engine that was developed by the French company of the same name and advertises with strict data protection regulations .

Search engine

After a two-year development phase, the first beta version was released in February 2013; the first stable version followed in July of the same year. The Qwant results page is split into several columns. In addition to the classic Internet search, the categories Live for information from news sites and Social for information from online networks such as Facebook , Twitter and Tumblr and for pictures , music and videos are displayed separately. There is also a section for advertising. Results from video and image files are listed at the top of the image.

According to the company, 507 million search queries were registered in a period of less than 10 months. France accounts for 65 percent of the traffic . In a test by the FAZ, Qwant performed roughly equally well in terms of the quality of the search results compared to Google , Bing and DuckDuckGo .

In February 2014 the German version was presented in Berlin . In addition, a cooperation with the developers of Firefox OS was concluded, which has now been discontinued. A cooperation with TripAdvisor was also concluded.

Qwant has also published two other variants of the search engine. Qwant Lite is a reduced and faster version of the search engine, which is particularly suitable for users of older browsers or computers with limited resources. Furthermore, a search portal for children and adolescents exists under the name Qwant Junior , which ignores search terms and results that are unsuitable for this group, but only had start pages in English or French at the start.

For its 5th birthday (2018), the search engine got a new design and was also optimized for smartphones.

privacy

Old logo from Qwant until the relaunch in June 2018
Old logo from Qwant until the relaunch in July 2018

With regard to the NSA scandal , the search engine advertises with stronger data protection regulations than is the case with competing companies. In this way, Qwant would not collect any personal data. Qwant only sets a cookie for the respective session, a permanent browser file is not created. The cookie is deleted immediately after leaving the page. The information on user behavior is not stored permanently. In contrast to other search engines such as Google or Yahoo , Qwant does not provide any personalized search results. The search results are the same for all users.

If the user wants personal search results, an account can be created. The personal information collected is processed on servers in data centers in the European Union .

Also, IP addresses are not recorded on stock.

financing

According to the company, the main income comes from advertisements (Qwant quote: "... with the Microsoft Bing advertising network ..."), which are displayed on Qwant's results page.

Companies

Qwant SAS was founded in 2011 by Frenchmen Jean-Manuel Rozan and Éric Leandri and the search engine was launched on the market in January 2013 after a two-year development phase. According to the developers, around 3.5 million euros in investment capital have been collected so far. The turnover is currently around 5 million euros per year, the number of employees is 25.

In June 2014, Axel Springer SE took a 20% stake in Qwant.

A sample search query on Qwant

technical infrastructure

Qwant's technical infrastructure consists of Hadoop clusters for web crawling, a MongoDB database for unstructured data and a self-developed index engine that creates and stores the web index in the form of JSON binaries. The search results are made available via Facebook's RocksDB, a key-value DB. According to their own information, however, their own web index is not yet complete and is therefore supplemented by the Bing web index . (As of April 21, 2017)

See also

Web links

Qwant's music search engine ( Qwant Music)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b QWANT, SIREN No. 532 867 256 R.CS Paris, www.infogreffe.fr
  2. ↑ Qwant: le nouveau moteur de recherche français est officiellement lancé. Retrieved January 31, 2019 (French).
  3. ↑ Die Welt : European Search Engine Promises Data Protection , March 4, 2014
  4. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: The search engine Qwant is not that bad at all , from March 4, 2014
  5. ↑ PC World : Firefox OS standard search QWANT started in Germany on March 4, 2014
  6. ↑ Search engine Qwant: New design for the 5th birthday . heise.de. July 6, 2018. Retrieved July 11, 2018.
  7. ↑ Handelsblatt : Search engine Qwant promises data protection , from March 4, 2014
  8. ↑ French search engine Qwant advertises data protection. Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 4, 2014, accessed on August 9, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Quant: How does Qwant make money? (June 20, 2017), accessed November 11, 2017.
  10. ↑ Heise Online: "Discovery Machine" Qwant promises more data protection than Google , from March 4, 2014
  11. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel: Internet searches are getting more colorful , from March 4, 2014
  12. ↑ Golem: Axel Springer joins Google competitor Qwant , from June 19, 2014
  13. ↑ JDN: Qwant: les secrets techniques du moteur de recherche français , from April 25, 2014
  14. ↑ Qwant: How does Qwant index the web? dated April 21, 2017, accessed February 16, 2018