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Comment by nxrabl | Hacker News Reader

“Google-free” in that the name is impossible to google? /s

I had not heard of Qwant before this. How does it compare to other privacy-focused search engines e.g. Duck Duck Go?

For search queries in French, DDG is a total no go for me while Qwant has decent results. But then, anything technical or in English I find myself automatically adding the &g suffix to search on Google.

They were based on Bing, but it changed years ago now and have their own crawlers.

Last time I read about it it wasn't very promising. If I remember correctly their code is proprietary and last time I checked it was just aggregating results from other search engines.

If I remember correctly, they did so in the early days - but should be using their own crawlers now.

Isn't this exactly what DDG does? Closed-source, aggregating/proxying other search engines like Yandex.

One thing that I like about DuckDuckGo is that you can browse results with arrow keys and enter. No simple way to load the next page, sadly. If you have it set as the search engine in Firefox, you can get mouseless search with ctrl+t and f6 if needed.

This is not to say that Qwant is horrible because of not having this (I just ran a couple of test queries and the results seem decent), just it would be nice if different "indie" search engines allowed navigation with keyboard.

> you can get mouseless search with ctrl+t and f6

You can get "very mouseless" with vim vixen add-on

I use it in China whenever my VPN is down. It's not blocked, yet.

On an unrelated note, hackernews has been blocked for at least a month or two. Probably due to lots of HK protest submissions in recent months.

To be honest, '/e/' is also not that easy to search for.

When I use DDG, I get results nearly as good as Google. I tried qwant; nowhere near as good. It is used mostly by those who resent the dominance and techical superiority of American tech companies, because it is based in france.

> It is used mostly by those who resent the dominance and techical superiority of American tech companies, because it is based in france.

Or maybe because they are subject, as an European company, to GDPR?

Isn't Google subject to GDPR despite being based in the US practically?

And isn't Google technically a EU company since they use the double irish with a dutch sandwich tax scheme?

The gdpr applies to Google's operations in europe.

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