Qwant



Qwant is a French search engine that launched in February 2013. Qwant is privacy focused, claiming to not track users, resell personal data, or bias the display of search results.

Creation
Qwant was founded on May 25, 2011 in Nice by investors Jean-Manuel Rozan, Éric Léandri, and Patrick Constant (via his company Pertimm, which developed other search engines for retail and other commercial services). The name Qwant stems from a combination of the letter Q from the word Quantities and the English word want.

The metasearch engine was launched in beta in 15 countries and 35 languages on February 16, 2013,  and in its final version on July 4, 2013 in its French localization.

Development
In its initial phase, Qwant used Bing’s API for its searches but began reducing its use in a transition to their own indexing (supplemented by other sources). This process would begin in February 2013, but lacking personnel and technology. They advertised using their own engine for indexing social media accounts and the "shopping" part of search results but they still used external APIs.

Since then, and until early 2019, Qwant is considered to be completely based on Bing Web and Images searches, insofar as we can see the first passage of their Qwant bot only from the end of 2014: they provided results based 100% on a Bing API, since they then had neither a crawler nor indexer, without saying this dependence on the Bing API, as imposed by the API CGUs.

The German publishing group Axel Springer invested capital in June 2014 with 20%, to initiate the development of an indexing robot specialized in the field of news ("News") in French to try to compete with Google News.

On April 14, 2015, Qwant unveiled a new version of its search engine with an updated graphical interface. France's Minister of Economics Emmanuel Macron called Qwant the "French Google."

In May 2016, the site claimed one million visits with 50% of visits coming from France and 30% from Germany.

On July 4, 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 August 2, 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.

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.

In March 2017, according to La Lettre A, the investment bank Bpifrance refused to participate in the raising of funds due to concerns about Qwant's use of technologies provided by Microsoft and servers at Huawei. Éric Léandri confirmed the use of results from Microsoft's search engine, Bing, to supplement the results generated by the Qwant algorithm, as well as the use of Bing's advertising department. It disputed that Bpifrance had access to Qwant's internal documents, even though Bpifrance had financed several projects and therefore had access to some of these internal documents, to the point of making an event.

However, in 2019, an audit of the DINUM, revealed by Le Media, will lead to explain the dependence on Bing, and even seek to measure it: it would be 60% of answers provided by Bing, without however being able to determine with certainty if everything would not come from the internal caches of Qwant - powered by Bing.

In April 2017, Qwant announced it was acquiring Nvidia brand supercomputers for deep learning to refine its research results and to rent its computers to startups that needed to use these technologies.

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. Qwant also announced that it would be the default search engine in the Fairphone 2 smartphone, after partnering with Fairphone.

In November 2017, Qwant bought Xilopix, a company based in Lorraine and publisher of the search engine Xaphir, which was experiencing financial difficulties. At the same time, it also partnered with Inria for research on Internet research technologies that respect privacy. Qwant also entered a partnership with Fleksy that integrated the search engine into the Fleksy virtual keyboard.

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.

In March 2018, Qwant became the official partner of the Tour de Corse motor rally and announced a world premiere, in partnership with the channel L'Équipe, broadcaster of the World Rally Championship in France, live streaming of the specials on its homepage. Qwant Junior was also released as an app for Android and iOS.

On July 4, 2018, a new, more streamlined version of Qwant was unveiled, version four; its logo was also changed for this new version.

In September 2018, Qwant and Lexibook announced he offering of Qwant products (including Qwant Junior) on LexiTab tablets. Qwant also became the default search engine for the Brave browser in France and Germany. , and the default search engine for the French Ministry of armies' computer stations on October 2, 2018.

On January 30, 2019, the aeronautical company Safran standardized the use of Qwant as a search engine within the company.

On March 27, 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 made possible thanks to the decision of 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.

In April 2019, the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) decided to use Qwant as the default search engine for all collaborators of its four centers of excellence, including the launch site of Ariane 5 and Ariane 6, the Guiana Space Centre, Europe's spaceport. Qwant also partnered with travel comparison site Easyvoyage to supply results for flight and hotel research.

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.

On September 25, 2019, the French interministerial Digital Directorate assessed in a technical audit report that Qwant's dependency on Microsoft Bing was at 64%.

In January 2020, Jean-Claude Ghinozzi became the CEO of Qwant, replacing Éric Léandri.

The French administration announced that Qwant would be the default search engine on all its computer stations by April 30, 2020.

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.

On May 12, 2020, Samsung Internet announced a partnership with Qwant to globally deploy the search engine.

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 (managing director) and Corinne Lejbowicz (President) took over the management of Qwant. The new management ceases to aim to dethrone Google and plans "rather 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, and was divided into a dozen legal structures according to the new management, which concealed the extent of the problems.

In September 2021, Qwant became available in all European countries and made it to the top 5 search engines available on Android phones. The European Commission signed the "choice screen" on Android phones teams in June 2021, and Qwant contributed to the passage of this resolution.

On November 25, 2021, Qwant publicly announced its contribution to the development of the "Manifesto of French startups" by the association France Digitale, intending to bring concrete proposals related to digital for the 2022 presidential election.

In early 2022, a new executive committee composed the management of Qwant: Laurent Ach CTO, Flore Blanchard-Dignac, CMO and Amélie Mathieu, CFO.

In June 2022, Qwant launched a browser extension, Qwant VIPrivacy, to block cookies and trackers on websites visited. Their website deployed a new graphic identity on the same occasion.

In January 2023, for Data Privacy Day, Qwant released the first edition of its online privacy barometer alongside Proton, Murena and Olvid.

Evolution of services
In December 2014, Qwant announced the beta release of Qwant Junior, its search engine for young audiences, targeting 3 to 12-year-olds. It launched experimentally in several French schools in January 2015, in partnership with the French National Education. On December 4, 2015, Qwant Junior was released as a final version.

On October 5, 2015, Qwant unveiled a Lite version of its search engine, intended for older browsers, aging terminals, and low-speed Internet connections. This streamlined version of the website did not use JavaScript or CSS3, technologies deemed too resource-consuming.

On June 3, 2016, the beta version of Qwant Music is launched, enabling searching for artists, albums and titles. In September 2017, Qwant Music was detached as a subsidiary based in Ajaccio, Corsica.

In 2016, new services were announced, expected to launch in 2016: Qwant Maps and Qwant Earth, which would offer tracking-free route searches.

In March 2018, Qwant Junior was released as an app for Android and iOS.

At VivaTech in May 2018, Qwant announced Qwant loT, the development of a search engine for the Internet of Things, in partnership with Kuzzle. They also announced QwantMed, tools to protect private medical data.

On June 8, 2018, the final version of Qwant Music was released. A partnership was signed with the music streaming and downloading service Qobuz, allowing CD-quality online listening of tracks recommended by the search engine in France.

At the end of August 2018, Qwant created Elunum, a search engine for elected officials and territorial agents. This engine was made in cooperation with Villes Internet.

On December 4, 2018, Qwant published Qwant Maps in alpha.

At the MWC in Barcelona, from February 25–28, 2019, Qwant unveiled Qwant Causes. Similar in concept to Lilo and Ecosia, it was a search engine that allowed funding a project while conducting searches respecting the privacy of the users.

On May 14, 2019, Qwant Causes was launched in partnership with HelloAsso, which was responsible for donations payment.

On June 27, 2019, Qwant Maps was released in beta. At the same time, the Masq by Qwant service is released in alpha.

On April 30, 2020, Qwant Causes was discontinued because "its use remains insufficient with regard to societal and associative issues addressed."

On September 17, 2020, Masq by Qwant was in turn discontinued.

At the end of 2020, Qwant refocused its services around its search engine and its online map service, Qwant Maps. The first version of the mapping service was announced for the spring of 2021. Qwant also discontinued its services in several countries but remained available in 39 countries worldwide.

In June 2022, Qwant launched Qwant VIPrivacy, a browsing extension that automatically blocks trackers and cookies when browsing. Qwant also launched the first privacy-friendly translation service on its search engine, in partnership with DeepL. It is possible to translate 28 languages from the Qwant search page.

Versions
Version 4, published in July 2018 for the 5 years of Qwant, 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 December 3, 2019, Qwant announced via Twitter 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, 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. It is still at the status of a hybrid engine. In 2020, Qwant claimed to have exceeded 50% of independent results for web searches, and 70% for all researchs.

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, and TripAdvisor displaying its reviews on Qwant Maps. Qwant's results are further augmented by the integration of application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by third-party companies, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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. It is mentioned there that it is published under MIT/X11 license, but the engine itself is not open source.

Controversies
Qwant was originally a meta-search engine that presented itself as a search engine. Two audits of the Interdepartmental Digital Directorate (Dinum) in July and September 2019 revealed that Qwant did have an index, but that it was not directly related to users' requests, according to LeMediaTV.

With dated results, the technical appendix of the first audit notes inconsistencies in cache management and cannot exclude situations where all cached data can come from the Bing API and not from Qwant's internal robots, especially since the team does not know precisely how to answer questions about the exact sequence of treatments, nor how to quantify its actual level of use of Bing.

According to co-founder Éric Léandri, Qwant does not want to compete with Google, but simply "show something different."

When launched in February 2013, Qwant did not advertise itself as privacy-focused. This would be because the door of American venture capital could not be opened for risk of an inevitable and feared technical audit, in conjunction with the Snowden outbreak in June 2013, which highlights general Internet surveillance, which provides an exit strategy for Qwant.

Due to its results being very similar to Bing and Wikipedia, a new version of the engine was published in April 2015, still based on the Bing API, but without clearly displaying it as required by the Bing API.

In the summer of 2016, in preparation for an audit conducted by the Caisse des dépôts et consignations with a view to an entry into the capital of Qwant, a code amendment to reduce the use of the Bing API took place a few days before the audit.

In September 2019, NextInpact revealed that CEO Éric Léandri threatened Qwant employees at the end of 2016.

In March 2017, after fundraising with the participation of the Caisse des dépôts et consignations, and after the refusal of funding by Bpifrance because of this strong dependence on Bing's API, new press articles touched on Qwant's use of several technologies, algorithms, and advertising governance, provided by Microsoft.

In its early stages, the similarity of its first logo with that of Google was pointed out. A few days after its launch in July 2013, it was accused by the designers of the Canadian search engine GooL.li, launched in 2012, of plagiarizing its interface. Mohamed Kahlain, co-founder of GooL.li, announced that he did not want to sue Qwant and said that he was not aware of the interface change.

In March 2017, Qwant, through the Open Internet Project, of which it is a member, accused Google of anti-competitive practices and filed a complaint with the European Commission in Brussels.

On the list of shareholders, grouped in a holding Angels 2, whose life president is Éric Léandri, it is possible to find Philippe Douste-Blazy, Thierry Gaubert, Franck Ullmann-Hamon or Claude Berda, among other investors from the world of advice and finance globally.

In July 2019, La Lettre A revealed that Qwant had been questioned by its main shareholder Caisse des dépôts et Consignations on Qwant's twenty highest salaries; the letter talks about wages that are “manifestly indecent”.

Confidentiality
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.

Research
With a new design released in 2022, the goal is to educate new audiences, especially younger ones, on the importance of protecting personal data. The homepage is colorful and engaging, and it has a space dedicated to content about the challenges of protecting digital personal data. A horizontal strip houses the search bar as well as to access other services of the brand such as news and maps.

Based on a given request, Qwant will highlight direct access to information insert, for clearer and faster information. The Lite version is always accessible.

Qwick
Similar to DuckDuckGo, Qwant allows performing redirect queries to other search engines or sites by typing the corresponding command called Qwick.

Qwant Junior
Qwant Junior is a search engine for children aged 6–12. This engine does not contain any advertising and filters the results so as not to show violent or pornographic content or e-commerce links. Since March 2023, Qwant Junior has partnered with the BayaM app, designed by publishers Bayard Jeunesse and Milan, to offer educational content to children aged 6–12.

Qwant Music
Qwant Music is a search engine for albums and artists developed in collaboration with Ircam and Qobuz.

Qwant Maps
Qwant Maps mapping service, based on OpenStreetMap, was released in alpha version on December 4, 2018. The service went into beta on June 27, 2019, and came out in a final version in 2021. Qwant Maps has most of the features of a classic online map, namely finding routes (by car, on foot, by bike, and by public transport), and places of interest (services, shops, and activities).

Qwant VIPrivacy
Qwant VIPrivacy is a browser extension, that allows users to block trackers and cookies when browsing the internet. In addition, once installed, Qwant becomes the default search engine used on the browser. This feature is included in mobile apps.

Qwant@Work
Qwant@Work is a service dedicated to businesses, administrations, and organizations, enabling them to protect the navigation of their employees by limiting the collection of personal data. The extension installs Qwant as the default search engine. The service was launched in January 2023.

Masq by Qwant
Masq by Qwant was a personal data storage service designed to personalize Qwant's service to users without collecting personal data. It was discontinued on September 17, 2020, because it “does not meet the expectations of most users.”

Qwant Causes
Announced at the Mobile World Congress 2019 and launched on May 14 of that year, Qwant Causes allowed funding of a project while doing research. This was similar in concept to the Lilo search engine, with the difference that creating an account was not mandatory, in keeping with Qwant's goal of protecting personal data. The service was launched in partnership with HelloAsso, which offered its beneficiary associations to benefit from the service. On the results pages of a query, more advertisements were displayed to fund these associations of general interest, without impacting Qwant's revenue. The service was discontinued on April 30, 2020, because of “insufficient use of societal and associative issues addressed.”

Qwant Boards
Qwant Boards allowed the sharing of images, videos, websites, or messages. On August 27, 2020, publishing new notebooks and accessing other users' notebooks was disabled, and user data was made available for download until a year later. The company's explained concerning the shutdown of this service: “We are aware that this service could be useful to you, however, the closure of Qwant Boards will allow all Qwant teams to focus even more on improving the Qwant search engine and creating new features and services that we believe will also please you.”

Qwant Junior Education
This was a version of Qwant Junior where teachers of French National Education could open a session through their academic email address.

Qwant School
Qwant School was a filtered version of the Qwant search engine designed for teens, especially middle school students. Like Qwant Junior, it did not display any advertising, online commerce links, or any violent or pornographic content to be displayed, although its filters were otherwise somewhat less restrictive

Popularity
In July 2013, a week after its launch, Qwant claimed 3.5 million monthly views. In February 2016, it claimed 17.7 million monthly visits and reported that traffic doubled in the previous six months. In November 2016, it claimed nearly 27 million monthly visits and 37 million at the beginning of 2017. At the end of July 2017, Qwant claimed 40 million monthly visits.

In June 2018, Qwant claimed to be the second most used search engine in France, and to have entered the top 50 most visited websites in France and the top 1,000 worldwide. This information is confirmed by the SimilarWeb site, but contradicted by the StatCounter site, which instead supports these figures: between June 2017 and June 2018, Qwant is the fifth search engine in France in terms of market share, with 0.55% against 90.99% for Google.

In October 2018, in an interview for Usine nouvelle magazine, for the “Nugget of the Year” award, Qwant explained the evolution of its popularity: 2.6 billion requests in 2016, 9.7 billion in 2017, and 18 billion in 2018. In 2018, this would amount to 1.6 billion requests per month.

In April 2018, nearly 81% of its traffic came from France, followed by Germany (5%) and Italy (2%).

In the first half of 2020, Qwant was the fourth most popular search engine in France, behind Google, Bing and Yahoo, and ahead of Ecosia and DuckDuckGo.

In August 2020, 79% of its traffic came from France, 7% from Germany, and 3% from the United States.

As of February 2021, according to SimilarWeb, 51.78% of its traffic (38.7 million searches) is from France, 10.96% from the US, 9.23% from Germany, 2.81% from Canada, and 2.76% from Italy.