Qwant () is a French search engine that launched in February 2013. Qwant claims to respect the privacy of its users by not tracking them for advertising purposes or reselling their personal data, as well as being impartial in the display of results.
The search engine is available as an app on iOS and Android, and as a browser extension.
History
Creation
Qwant was founded on May 25, 2011 in Nice by investor Jean-Manuel Rozan, by Patrick Constant via his company Pertimm (which developed other search engines for retail and other commercial services), and by Éric Léandri. The name Qwant is, according to its creators, a combination of the letter Q from the word Quantities (or possibly Quantique)—evoking the mass of data that the indexing robot scans daily—and the English word want.
The metasearch engine was launched in beta in 15 countries and 35 languages on February 16, 2013 then in final version on July 4, 2013 in its French localization after a year and a half of research and development.
Development
In 2013, the creators of Qwant recognized and minimized the use of Bing’s programming interfaces before switching to their own indexing (supplemented by other sources), a process which 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 a first passage of their Qwantify 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 entered the 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 and is put under the spotlight by the Minister of Economy Emmanuel Macron, calling Qwant "Google French on the move."
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 offer in Europe.
In May 2016, the site claimed 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 results from this partnership, specifically optimized for the use of Qwant. On August 2, 2016, a mobile version is 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 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 to remain in the capital.
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 disputes 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 rent its calculators to startups that need to use these technologies.