French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan | Hacker News Reader

French search firm Qwant seeks €8M Huawei bailout loan

politico.eu

72 pointsColinHayhurst51 comments

Well, they didn't innovate. They didn't add anything new to searches nor can I find a real differentiator in the product. It's a "privacy search engine that uses bing... but French!".

It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking browser-extension, there are no special integrations with any services, no new ways of filtering stuff (e.g a list of people who rate search results that you can subscribe to), just... there's nothing really attractive or catchy about it.

They could've taken or forked Yacy (federated, opensource search engine), dumped those millions into it and made it a serious project, but alas

They don't use bing for the most part, they have their own crawlers and their results are far better than nearly any other competitor. I have been a happy user for the past two years.

They use Bing for their ad network, and to sometimes (rarely) produce results when their own crawlers fail.

In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface.

I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me). Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise from it.

I've been using Qwant as my main search engine for 2 years at least and ime/imo the results were fine. When a given query didn't give the results I expected, I searched for the same in Google and often came away similarly disappointed. I'm sad to see that Qwant is struggling.

I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.

What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise?

edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations.

>edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google.

If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.

Is it legal to scrape search results and use it in a competitive product?. Is this a legal grey area or its settled in court?

Really? That’s disappointing. Thanks for the heads up, I guess this explains why the results were good.

While Brave does turn many away with its built in cryptocurrency and its questionable userbase, it's a damn good browser. I switched from FF after the layoffs and in short it has better privacy, UX and feature set and all BAT functionality can be easily and completely disabled.

It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow down Google's plans.

It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still another choice.

The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; especially as they own the publisher. It might be a call for another more palatable, to them, savior.

Their efforts to develop their own index would offer a real alternative and this is important for society and the economy. This article [0] dicusses those struggles saying “The technology developed worked super well on a few million indexed pages, but needed to be modified to operate on a larger scale,”. Certainly building an index for billions of pages and which operates fast is a big challenge we had to get over. There are many choices to make when designing, developing and deploying each of the three elements of a crawler, index and ranking engine. And those choices lead to big differences in SERPs: differences that are very distinct compared with what is offered between a search "engine" company and any of their syndication partners.

Self-disclosure: CEO of a search engine company

[0] http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-goo...

What is Huawei’s strategy here? Other than they need a non US search engine for their European audience.

That might well be a main reason. Plus search options for HarmonyOS beyond Petal Search. But the article states the main aim IMO: "Financial backing could mean the Chinese player gains a say over the company's operations, at a time when Huawei stands accused by several governments of spying and has been pushed out of key markets."

For any sufficiently large Chinese company substitute 'China'.

Maybe they're trying to compete with Baidu.

They have a decent search engine in petal search:

https://petalsearch.com

This would be for a western european audience. I don't think you can get us to Baidu, however you can probably get us to use Qwant.

So maybe it is the brand they are after.

It's not an alternative, it's a substitute, an ersatz.

> The company lost €13 million in 2020, €23 million in 2019 and €11.2 million in 2018 for revenues that amount respectively for €7.5 million, €5.8 million and €3 million.

Pfft ... this seems to be peanuts for the Silicon Valley VCs out there.

They've got a terrible, terrible product. Not sure they would have received anything from a Silicon Valley VC.

That's not how it works. In SV they would have received 10fold the funding that they received in Europe. As a result, most likely they would have had a better product.

Not so sure. Why compete with Google by trying to do exactly the same thing, but worse? It's a shitty business plan. Might even be too shit for SV.

> trying to do exactly the same thing, but worse

You mean launching Google when we have Altavista?

Launching FB when we have LiveJournal?

(I mean at founding/initial version level, of course they became better than their competition, but that took time)

The sad part about this is that $8Mi is peanuts.

> You mean launching Google when we have Altavista?

google was miles ahead of altavista.

> Launching FB when we have LiveJournal

FB was miles ahead of LiveJournal.

—-

a trend appears…

Not at their beginning they weren't. Google wasn't better than AV after their first investment.

FB wasn't even public at first, but School/University only.

They had different ideas / approaches.

Even Juicero raised money.

I remember trying Qwant a few years ago and I wasn't really happy with it, both for search results and UI/UX. Staying with a Google search alternative, I went with DuckDuckGo and didn't look back (especially with access to g! to easily search on Google if ddg fails to dig up what I want)

Qwant does support !g etc if you end up needing it.

Is there any reason to use Qwant over DDG, aside from a Francophone focus?

Not American and thus not subject to us intelligence surveillance.

Isn't it vice-versa? It's hard from a legal point of view to spy on one of your own, but it's easier to do it on a foreign entity?

> During the 2013 NSA leaks Internet spying scandal, the surveillance agencies of the "Five Eyes" have been accused of intentionally spying on one another's citizens and willingly sharing the collected information with each other, allegedly circumventing laws preventing each agency from spying on its own citizens.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Controversy

Yes. I was assuming an European perspective - also I don’t think any European intelligence service have anywhere near the capabilities of the US ones.

What they call here a "bailout loan" is what Americans call next round of funding for tech companies.

> backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Qwant was designed to become a rival to U.S. search giant Google and bolster the EU's tech sector

How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU. Really, it's cringe worth.

The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.

(European here, just in case someone takes this for some nationalistic rant from the US).

Every word is correct. The EU has become an embarrassing buerocratic nightmare for anything related to tech.

The EU needs to completely start over somehow.

did china copy SV to setup their comparable companies?

tencent, alibaba, baidu

Good question. By "copy SV" I meant "set up an environment (law, financing) similar to the SV one. Looking for VC funding in China for example you get this (from here [1]):

"According to the Wall Street Journal, investments by Chinese VCs now represent 40 percent of the worldwide total (Silicon Valley still leads the field at 44 percent [edit: this puts Europe at 12% at most]) and China’s share is 15 times greater than in 2013.

VC investment in China grew by 3,000 percent – from 1.1 billion dollars to 34.1 billion dollars – between 2006 and 2016, with the fastest growth occurring between 2013 and 2016 (up to 2013, average VC investment in China was 4.3 billion dollars a year). This rate of growth continued after 2016.

Chinese startups attracted more VC money than their American counterparts – 56 billion dollars as opposed to 42 billion dollars – for the first time in the first half of 2018. However, that has not proved to be all good news. Due to the availability of VC money, and pressure by owners and shareholders of VC funds to invest,even less promising startups can secure funding relatively easily in China."

[1] https://www.netherlandsworldwide.nl/countries/china/startup-...

>The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.

This is also why there won't ever be a EU Silicon Valley. Paris isn't going to support any Europe-wide effort to create one that isn't located in the Hexagon, nor will Berlin support one that isn't somewhere in Germany. London pre-Brexit would not and did not support anything that might take away from Silicon Fen.

While other US states encourage their own tech centers' growth, Floridians and New Yorkers and Texans are all aware of, benefit from, and are proud of Silicon Valley being in the US. This can't and won't happen in the EU unless and until people feel more strongly that they are EU citizens than of their own countries, and maybe not even then.

They did copy SV, the product just sources results from Bing, like DuckDuckGo does.

They’re begging to sell 5-7.5% of the compny for €8m?

Sounds like it is time for Qwant to give up.

It's all political and diversion of public funds (if that's the correct English term, I edited "money laundering" out).

Qwant should be dead, it is said most of its index is served by Bing anyway (they used to hide it for years and lie about their own indexing stats).

> Qwant should be dead, it is said most of its index is served by Bing anyway.

Almost all search engines apart from Google use the Bing Index, including DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo! Search. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

This might be of use to you also: https://searchenginemap.com/

That's an excellent website, thank you very much for your suggestion!

Can you substantiate these (seemingly bizarre) claims of money laundering?

France has invested a lot of money into this company. And it was approved to become the official search engine on many state administration's computers, even after an audit revealed the terrible quality of their product. Things are a bit shady around Qwant, and this is ground for all kind of suspicions (not that I'm endorsing any).

Neither 'diversion of public funds' (I believe you mean embezzlement) nor 'money laundering' would fit the description. This is more akin to 'poor use of public funds', which is also common in the US, and equally frown upon.

I think the term he's looking for is Embezzlement of Public Funds indeed.

It's not just "poor use of public funds", but illegal use of public funds. For example when a public institution picks a supplier in an illegal manner (i.e. picking a friend instead of respecting the process for a public contract, or using public funds for personal benefits).

You mean like when US government gives billions of dollars to bankrupt companies? Maybe the French are getting cues from Washington.

'Embezzlement' seems harsh, 'crony capitalism' (collusion between a business class and the political class) is IMHO the cause here.

That does not fit any definition of money laundering.

It sounds more like decisions are being made based on politics, presumably with an eye to the long-term improvement and viability of Qwant.

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