[HN Gopher] Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
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Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
Author : Mizza
Score : 43 points
Date : 2020-11-12 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.qwant.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.qwant.com)
| crocodiletears wrote:
| At some point, we're going to cut the branding middle-man, and
| put Bing on the front page of HN as a viable alternative to
| Google Search.
|
| Not as sexy as the high-minded front organizations that reskin
| it, but it'd be nice if we could be honest with ourselves about
| the beasts we were feeding.
| gnufx wrote:
| Is that meant to imply that the privacy protection and un-
| bubbling of the "middle men" is bogus? (I don't know about
| Qwant, but DDG isn't solely Bing, and it feeds some worthwhile
| organizations with donations.)
| 1996 wrote:
| I use Bing (and Edge, and Windows 10...) but for the average HN
| reader that's not cool enough. Tech is more and more about
| personal branding and following the hype train. DDG is in. Bing
| is not.
|
| Also, for the older crowd who came from slashdot (and still
| says 'Micro$oft') it'd be morally unacceptable to use Bing.
| They prefer to give all their data to Google, because they
| still see it as fresh and new.
|
| So close, but no cigar.
| not2b wrote:
| DDG isn't just a rebrand of Bing (and wouldn't be even if
| they did all searches via Bing); they don't pass personal
| information along to Bing that would allow Microsoft to track
| the user.
| [deleted]
| bb101 wrote:
| I've been generally happy with startpage.com, they seem to mirror
| Google's results. And it works with dark mode. You don't get the
| contextual niceties that you get with Google though e.g. results
| for "70F in C".
| cpv wrote:
| FYI, startpage seems to be owned by an ad company
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577
| tirz wrote:
| I used it for a long time (and 2 years as my main search engine)
| for 3 reasons... - it is french - it is working in
| Europa/USA/China (I studied in Paris/San Francisco/Tianjin) - my
| best friend used to works their We had some good talks about
| Qwant, but it will be not relevant for my user review.
|
| So here we are:
|
| 1. They are not Open-Source (as opposite to Searx).
|
| Only the plugins are. Can we trust them when they say to respect
| our privacy ?
|
| 2. They are not TOR friendly.
|
| Full of captchaS !!!
|
| 3. They have no onion site.
|
| DDG have one.
|
| 4. They run some kind of weird analytics.
|
| Each time we click on a search, the JS code trigger a fetch to
| `https://api.qwant.com/api/action/url` and include: - our current
| language - the query we searched - the link we clicked - etc...
| They were backed by Bing before, is it still the case or are they
| running their own stats engine? I do not know. If we trigger
| ourself some false fetches, can we show "twitter" as first result
| when someone searches for "facebook"?
|
| 5. Their lite version is not lite (=/= duckduckgo.com/html/).
|
| They redirect all our clicks to be able to run their analytics
| without the JS's fetch API. They cannot store the config : go to
| settings, do whatever you want, do your search, switch tab (go to
| "news" for example) => your settings are reset to default. You
| may fix it by adding your settings to the link "&l=en...".
|
| 6. Their front-side is broken.
|
| If we visit their site without user-agent, we have an exception
| in their JS which crash the page (blank page).
|
| 7. They do not care.
|
| I emailed them maybe 5-6 bugs, they never replied nether fixed
| them.
|
| 8. Their API is sometime weird (just because not documented ?).
|
| I runned a custom front-end without Qwant's analytics and the
| minimum working request is:
| `https://api.qwant.com/api/search/web?q=hacker
| news&count=10&offset=0&uiv=4&t=`. What is "&uiv=4"? Why can't it
| be null or 0? What is "&t="? Is it really needed? Why is it not
| needed everywhere? =>
| `https://api.qwant.com/api/suggest?q=duckduck`
|
| In sum up, in a customer point of view, Qwant is just a frenchy
| Google hosted mainly in Europa and allowed in China. Nothing new
| here, I recommend to stick to DDG for the moment.
| blindm wrote:
| I've been trying to get search results for months now, and Qwant
| just fails everytime with a white screen of death. See
| screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/jUv6vm0
|
| I've even tried with different IPs / VPN connections and it still
| refuses to show results.
|
| Surely I'm not the only user who experiences this?
| blinzy wrote:
| That also happens to me if I disable javascript (and therefore
| get their Qwant Lite page).
|
| However, it works if you use a non-English language:
|
| https://lite.qwant.com/?l=de&q=foobar
|
| https://lite.qwant.com/?l=en&q=foobar <-- this won't work (or
| omitting l=en)
|
| https://lite.qwant.com/?l=es&q=foobar
|
| https://lite.qwant.com/?l=fr&q=foobar
| progre wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with https://www.runnaroo.com/ for the
| past months
| Mizza wrote:
| This was posted in another thread, but I'd never seen it before.
| French-made.
|
| Results seem just as good as Google, PutLocker searchers work,
| and it's as privacy-respecting as DDG. I've been using it all day
| and I'm happy with the results, so I thought I'd share.
| helph67 wrote:
| I have been using it for many months and prefer it to DDG.
| Haven't used Goo in years!
| LunaSea wrote:
| It's just a front for Bing.
|
| The company is pure hype, no results.
| jstr wrote:
| lol you're right. The results are identical.
| 1996 wrote:
| It's a bit more than just hype: it's rebranding Bing results
| to make them more palatable to a EU audience, while guzzling
| on public subsidies to pretend it's a EU unicorn and gather
| support from nationalists.
|
| There are actual results - as public subsidies scam!
| maverick74 wrote:
| I have a better one:
|
| https://infinitySearch.Co
|
| It's Open-source, it's a search engine (they have their own
| crawler and their own index) and it's private!!!
| schoen wrote:
| The slashes after the colon should be forward slashes (/)
| rather than backslashes (\\).
| maverick74 wrote:
| WT...?! How the ____did I do that?!?!
|
| I mean: I've developed websites... What the ____was in my
| head?!
|
| LOL
|
| THANKS for not letting me look like a dumb for too much
| long
| notsgnik wrote:
| not really... https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Some obvious differences...
|
| Bing sets cookies. Qwant does not set cookies.
|
| Qwant, i.e., lite.qwant.com, prefixes search result URLs to point
| to Qwant servers. Qwant redirects www.qwant.com to lite.qwant.com
| when Javascipt is disabled. Bing does not prefix search results.
|
| Bing requires sign-up in order to use their API. Qwant's
| undocumented API is freely accessible, no sign-up.
|
| Qwant, i.e., lite.qwant.com, requires a User-Agent header. Bing
| does not require a UA header.
|
| Example of Qwant API curl "https://api.qwant.com
| /api/search/videos?q=example&count=150&offset=0&f=xyz&t=xyz&l=en_
| gb&uiv=xyz"
| dmacvicar wrote:
| I have tried multiple times to use it, but it takes several
| seconds to load, vs DuckDuckgo which shows up almost instantly.
| notsgnik wrote:
| first try... disappointed :/
|
| https://i.imgur.com/fUTOkP6.png
| blinzy wrote:
| As I posted on another comment I think that happens because you
| have disabled Javascript and there seems to be a bug for
| English. If you use JS (as done for your Google search) it
| returns results as expected.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| You can also use Qwant Lite, it's just like the HTML version
| of DDG: https://lite.qwant.com/
|
| Edit: saw your other message, doesn't work in English because
| of a bug
| maltelandwehr wrote:
| Why not use Ecosia instead? Same search results, same - if not
| better - privacy, and they use their ad revenue to plant trees.
| leahshule56 wrote:
| I'm getting zero results under web for common search terms on
| brave mobile. Making this engine entirely useless to me...
| shirakawasuna wrote:
| I'm not sure there is a way to create a search engine that can
| verifiably respect your privacy unless you were to self-host the
| entire thing.
|
| This one's hosted in France. France is part of Nine Eyes, among
| other things.
| rasengan wrote:
| Private.sh encrypts queries on the client side and routes
| requests thru proxies to maximize privacy.
| blindm wrote:
| Try a live link instead, it helps users out who have to copy
| and paste the URL: https://private.sh/
| justeasy wrote:
| not bad.
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(page generated 2020-11-12 23:02 UTC)