Qwant
Qwant is a French search engine, launched in February 2013. Qwant says that it is focused on privacy, does not track users, resell personal data, or bias the display of search results. Its results are similar to the Microsoft Bing search engine, however it is used only in case Qwant lacks information of certain website and for image searches. As of 2023, Qwant can be accessed from around 30 countries.
Etymology
The name Qwant stems from a combination of the letter Q from the word Quantum and the English word want.History
Creation
Qwant was created on May 25, 2011 in Nice by investors Jean-Manuel Rozan, Éric Léandri, and Patrick Constant.The metasearch engine was launched in beta in 15 countries and 35 languages on 16 February 2013, and in its final version on 4 July 2013 in its French localization.
Development
In its initial phase, Qwant used Bing’s API for searches but started a gradual transition to its own indexing system starting in February 2013. This process lacked personnel and technology. While Qwant promoted its own engine for indexing social media and "shopping" search results, it continued to rely heavily on external APIs.By early 2019, Qwant was considered to be completely reliant on Bing for web and image searches, producing results entirely through the Bing API as Qwant had neither a crawler nor an indexer at the time.
In June 2014, the German publishing group Axel Springer invested 20% in Qwant to support the development of a specialized indexing robot for news in French, aimed at competing with Google News.
On 14 April 2015, Qwant unveiled a new version of its search engine with an updated graphical interface.
In October 2016, the European Investment Bank announced an investment in the company in the form of a €25 million loan over 5 years to expand its reach in Europe.
In February 2017, Qwant announced that it had raised €18.5 million, including €15 million from the Caisse des dépôts et consignations, which has a 20% stake, with the remainder coming from the Axel Springer group.
On 4 July 2018, a new, more streamlined version of Qwant was unveiled, version four; its logo was also changed for this new version.
Restructuring
In May 2019, Qwant announced that it would migrate its servers to an infrastructure based on Microsoft Azure, and also keep some of its indexing capacity on its infrastructure.In January 2020, Jean-Claude Ghinozzi became the CEO of Qwant, replacing Éric Léandri.
At the end of June 2020, Qwant began restructuring. The closure of its Épinal and Ajaccio offices was announced to meet a requirement from major shareholders, the Caisse des dépôts et consignations and Axel Springer.
In 2020, Qwant's net sales increased by 28% to €7.5 million. Losses fell to €13 million from €23.5 million in 2019.
New direction
In 2021, Raphaël Auphan and Corinne Lejbowicz assumed management of Qwant. Rather than aiming to dethrone Google, the new management plans "to build step by step a real ecosystem of private and secure navigation on the Internet."According to the new executives, the old Qwant shone by its opacity:
- the company kept the blur on its actual use
- minimized its use of Bing
- was divided into a dozen legal structures according to the new management, which concealed the extent of the problems.
Qwant discontinued its services in several countries but remained available in 39 countries worldwide.
Partnership with Ecosia and reduced dependency on Microsoft
In 2023, Microsoft dramatically raised Bing's search API rates. Since Qwant relied on Bing to provide results for long tail searches, the change forced Qwant to change its business model. In response, Qwant and Germany's Ecosia teamed up to create a 50–50 joint venture called the European Search Perspective. Qwant will transfer the search indexing infrastructure it was building as well as some of its engineers and data scientists. Ecosia is making a cash contribution.Versions
In June 2017, a version adapted to the Swiss culture was launched and offered in three of the four national languages: German, French, and Italian.In January 2018, Qwant announced its expected arrival in China by the summer of 2018, in partnership with local authorities and companies to adapt it to Chinese laws. The five-year-anniversary version launched in 2018 eliminated the column-based presentation in favor of a more web-friendly presentation. The different types of current/social research remained accessible through a side menu.
On 3 December 2019, Qwant announced the arrival of a new design to "simplify the experience and bring new experiences". In March 2021, a new version was made available online to rejuvenate the interface and make it more accessible on smartphones.
In June 2022, Qwant unveiled a new identity to engage new hearings on the importance of personal data protection.
Features
Qwant offers several types of results in the same search: classic websites, merchant websites and news webs not based on information related to the user's profile. In its early days, the Qwant search engine relied on Bing to provide more relevant results.In 2016, Qwant claimed to be increasingly using its own results from its own exploration robots as a hybrid engine.
In 2020, Qwant claimed to have exceeded 50% of independent results for web searches, and 70% for all researchs.
Business model
Qwant's business model is partly based on cost-per-click through contextual advertising. It also has partnerships with companies such as TripAdvisor, PagesJaunes and DeepL. These serve to enrich the results, such as by DeepL providing its translation service directly on the Qwant results page. Qwant's results are further augmented by the integration of application programming interfaces provided by third-party companies, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.Privacy
The only cookies Qwant installs are for core functionality and not for advertising. Local storage is also used to save the search engine's parameters, such as the theme, filtering parameters, and the language.The results displayed are not customized according to a search history, as with Google, but instead depend on the general trends of the moment. Since mid-2016, Qwant has been sending data to Microsoft Bing Ads to respond to requests—specifically, the IP/24 of the user, the User-Agent of their browser, and the search keywords. These data were not anonymized but pseudonymized. This was done without informed consent of its users. It did not announce this until mid-2021.
Partnerships
Mozilla Foundation
On 4 July 2016, Qwant announced a global partnership with the Mozilla Foundation. A new version of the Firefox web browser resulted from this partnership, specifically optimized for the use of Qwant. On 2 August 2016, a mobile version was also made available. On this occasion, Qwant said it wanted to reach “5% to 8% market share on the continent by 2018–2019” and "achieve €2.5 million in sales" in 2016. Continuing this partnership, a Qwant app for Android and iOS smartphones was released, based on a fully open source fork of Mozilla Firefox.Qwant's extension for Mozilla Firefox is on the list of free software recommended by the French State as part of the overall modernization of its information systems. While it is published under MIT/X11 license, the engine itself is not open source.
Inria
Qwant partnered with Inria for research on Internet research technologies that respect privacy.Wiko
On 27 March 2019, a partnership between Qwant and Wiko was announced. Wiko launched a new version of its View 2 Pro with Qwant as its default search engine, becoming the first Android phone to not use Google as the default.This was a result of the decision of European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in July 2018 to impose a fine of €4.34 billion on Google for abuse of its dominant position within the Android operating system.
Fairphone
Qwant announced that it would be the default search engine in the Fairphone 2 smartphone, after partnering with Fairphone.Samsung
On 12 May 2020, Samsung Internet announced a partnership with Qwant to globally deploy the search engine.Huawei
chose Qwant as the default search engine on its P40 smartphone in France, Germany, and Italy, in response to US sanctions.In May 2021, Qwant's CEO asked shareholders for permission to borrow €8 million from Huawei.