Qwant Product Overview
Qwant is a privacy-focused French search engine launched in February 2013, designed to provide users with a secure, unbiased, and personalized search experience without compromising their privacy.
Core Functionality
- Search Engine: Qwant allows users to search the web, news, images, videos, and music, similar to other major search engines. However, it stands out by not collecting or storing user data, ensuring that searches are private and not tracked.
Key Features
- Privacy Protection: Qwant does not use cookies to track user actions or searches. It encrypts search queries and does not sell personal data to third-party companies, making it an attractive alternative to mainstream search engines.
- Unbiased Results: Qwant’s algorithms ensure impartial and balanced search results, free from biases based on political, economic, or social criteria. The search results are not influenced by the user’s search history or profile.
- Customizable Search: Users can filter search results by categories such as news, images, videos, and music. Additionally, they can select the country and language for their results and choose the freshness of the content.
- Additional Services: Qwant offers several complementary services, including Qwant Maps for privacy-oriented navigation and Qwant Music for discovering and streaming music. There is also a Qwant Junior version, which is a child-friendly search engine designed for educational and safe search results.
- Mobile App: Qwant has mobile apps for both Android and iOS, providing users with a private, fast, and secure browsing experience on their mobile devices. The app includes features like cookie-free searching and activated tracking protection.
- Artificial Intelligence Integration: Qwant has integrated artificial intelligence to offer short, precise answers to everyday searches and questions. The “Summary” feature provides a condensed summary of web pages with just one click, available once a user creates a Qwant account.
- Browser Extension: Qwant offers a browser extension that allows users to set Qwant as their default search engine, ensuring a seamless and private search experience across all browsing sessions.
Technical and Security Aspects
- HTTPS and Secure Servers: Qwant uses HTTPS to ensure secure connections and operates on secure servers to protect user data.
- Proprietary Algorithms: Qwant employs its own indexing methods and algorithms, which have increasingly become independent from third-party services like Bing. By 2020, Qwant claimed to have exceeded 50% of independent results for web searches and 70% for all research.
Conclusion
In summary, Qwant is a robust and privacy-focused search engine that combines advanced search capabilities with a strong commitment to user privacy and data protection, making it a viable alternative to traditional search engines.