Well, they didn't innovate. They didn't add anything new to searches nor can I find a real differentiator in the product. It's a "privacy search engine that uses bing... but French!".
It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking browser-extension, there are no special integrations with any services, no new ways of filtering stuff (e.g a list of people who rate search results that you can subscribe to), just... there's nothing really attractive or catchy about it.
They could've taken or forked Yacy (federated, opensource search engine), dumped those millions into it and made it a serious project, but alas
They don't use bing for the most part, they have their own crawlers and their results are far better than nearly any other competitor. I have been a happy user for the past two years.
They use Bing for their ad network, and to sometimes (rarely) produce results when their own crawlers fail.
In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface.
I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me). Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise from it.
I've been using Qwant as my main search engine for 2 years at least and ime/imo the results were fine. When a given query didn't give the results I expected, I searched for the same in Google and often came away similarly disappointed. I'm sad to see that Qwant is struggling.
I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.
While Brave does turn many away with its built in cryptocurrency and its questionable userbase, it's a damn good browser. I switched from FF after the layoffs and in short it has better privacy, UX and feature set and all BAT functionality can be easily and completely disabled.
It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow down Google's plans.
It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still another choice.
The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; especially as they own the publisher. It might be a call for another more palatable, to them, savior.
Their efforts to develop their own index would offer a real alternative and this is important for society and the economy. This article [0] dicusses those struggles saying “The technology developed worked super well on a few million indexed pages, but needed to be modified to operate on a larger scale,”. Certainly building an index for billions of pages and which operates fast is a big challenge we had to get over. There are many choices to make when designing, developing and deploying each of the three elements of a crawler, index and ranking engine. And those choices lead to big differences in SERPs: differences that are very distinct compared with what is offered between a search "engine" company and any of their syndication partners.
That might well be a main reason. Plus search options for HarmonyOS beyond Petal Search. But the article states the main aim IMO: "Financial backing could mean the Chinese player gains a say over the company's operations, at a time when Huawei stands accused by several governments of spying and has been pushed out of key markets."
> The company lost €13 million in 2020, €23 million in 2019 and €11.2 million in 2018 for revenues that amount respectively for €7.5 million, €5.8 million and €3 million.
Pfft ... this seems to be peanuts for the Silicon Valley VCs out there.
That's not how it works. In SV they would have received 10fold the funding that they received in Europe. As a result, most likely they would have had a better product.
I remember trying Qwant a few years ago and I wasn't really happy with it, both for search results and UI/UX. Staying with a Google search alternative, I went with DuckDuckGo and didn't look back (especially with access to g! to easily search on Google if ddg fails to dig up what I want)
> backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Qwant was designed to become a rival to U.S. search giant Google and bolster the EU's tech sector
How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU. Really, it's cringe worth.
The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.
(European here, just in case someone takes this for some nationalistic rant from the US).
The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.
did china copy SV to setup their comparable companies?
Good question. By "copy SV" I meant "set up an environment (law, financing) similar to the SV one. Looking for VC funding in China for example you get this (from here [1]):
"According to the Wall Street Journal, investments by Chinese VCs now represent 40 percent of the worldwide total (Silicon Valley still leads the field at 44 percent [edit: this puts Europe at 12% at most]) and China’s share is 15 times greater than in 2013.
VC investment in China grew by 3,000 percent – from 1.1 billion dollars to 34.1 billion dollars – between 2006 and 2016, with the fastest growth occurring between 2013 and 2016 (up to 2013, average VC investment in China was 4.3 billion dollars a year). This rate of growth continued after 2016.
Chinese startups attracted more VC money than their American counterparts – 56 billion dollars as opposed to 42 billion dollars – for the first time in the first half of 2018. However, that has not proved to be all good news. Due to the availability of VC money, and pressure by owners and shareholders of VC funds to invest,even less promising startups can secure funding relatively easily in China."
>The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.
This is also why there won't ever be a EU Silicon Valley. Paris isn't going to support any Europe-wide effort to create one that isn't located in the Hexagon, nor will Berlin support one that isn't somewhere in Germany. London pre-Brexit would not and did not support anything that might take away from Silicon Fen.
While other US states encourage their own tech centers' growth, Floridians and New Yorkers and Texans are all aware of, benefit from, and are proud of Silicon Valley being in the US. This can't and won't happen in the EU unless and until people feel more strongly that they are EU citizens than of their own countries, and maybe not even then.
Readit News
It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking browser-extension, there are no special integrations with any services, no new ways of filtering stuff (e.g a list of people who rate search results that you can subscribe to), just... there's nothing really attractive or catchy about it.
They could've taken or forked Yacy (federated, opensource search engine), dumped those millions into it and made it a serious project, but alas
They use Bing for their ad network, and to sometimes (rarely) produce results when their own crawlers fail.
I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me). Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise from it.
edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself
Deleted Comment
It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow down Google's plans.
The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; especially as they own the publisher. It might be a call for another more palatable, to them, savior.
Their efforts to develop their own index would offer a real alternative and this is important for society and the economy. This article [0] dicusses those struggles saying “The technology developed worked super well on a few million indexed pages, but needed to be modified to operate on a larger scale,”. Certainly building an index for billions of pages and which operates fast is a big challenge we had to get over. There are many choices to make when designing, developing and deploying each of the three elements of a crawler, index and ranking engine. And those choices lead to big differences in SERPs: differences that are very distinct compared with what is offered between a search "engine" company and any of their syndication partners.
Self-disclosure: CEO of a search engine company
[0] http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-goo...
Deleted Comment
Pfft ... this seems to be peanuts for the Silicon Valley VCs out there.
How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU. Really, it's cringe worth.
The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.
(European here, just in case someone takes this for some nationalistic rant from the US).
The EU needs to completely start over somehow.
did china copy SV to setup their comparable companies?
tencent, alibaba, baidu
"According to the Wall Street Journal, investments by Chinese VCs now represent 40 percent of the worldwide total (Silicon Valley still leads the field at 44 percent [edit: this puts Europe at 12% at most]) and China’s share is 15 times greater than in 2013.
VC investment in China grew by 3,000 percent – from 1.1 billion dollars to 34.1 billion dollars – between 2006 and 2016, with the fastest growth occurring between 2013 and 2016 (up to 2013, average VC investment in China was 4.3 billion dollars a year). This rate of growth continued after 2016.
Chinese startups attracted more VC money than their American counterparts – 56 billion dollars as opposed to 42 billion dollars – for the first time in the first half of 2018. However, that has not proved to be all good news. Due to the availability of VC money, and pressure by owners and shareholders of VC funds to invest,even less promising startups can secure funding relatively easily in China."
[1] https://www.netherlandsworldwide.nl/countries/china/startup-...
This is also why there won't ever be a EU Silicon Valley. Paris isn't going to support any Europe-wide effort to create one that isn't located in the Hexagon, nor will Berlin support one that isn't somewhere in Germany. London pre-Brexit would not and did not support anything that might take away from Silicon Fen.
While other US states encourage their own tech centers' growth, Floridians and New Yorkers and Texans are all aware of, benefit from, and are proud of Silicon Valley being in the US. This can't and won't happen in the EU unless and until people feel more strongly that they are EU citizens than of their own countries, and maybe not even then.
Sounds like it is time for Qwant to give up.
Qwant should be dead, it is said most of its index is served by Bing anyway (they used to hide it for years and lie about their own indexing stats).
Almost all search engines apart from Google use the Bing Index, including DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo! Search. [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines