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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

Don't believe a single second the marketing speech about these 2 engines, they are both total crap trying to gain users with whatever hype subject is around.

Qwant used to pretend being a champion of privacy, a "french made" tech, but with a search engine mostly based on Bing, lobbying with Microsoft against our interests, and with a boss sucking as much public funding as possible to finance luxury HQ locations and lavish cars...

Qwant collapsed and was sold, but now it is just a mediocre ghost product trying to capitalize on a stained branding and on being a French/european alternative.

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Qwant is just burning French tax payer money in an effort to "compete".

Is it somehow related to the Quaero search engine project that burnt 400 million € of taxpayer money in the early 2000s?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

https://www.heise.de/news/400-Millionen-Euro-fuer-europaeisc...

It is not directly related except by the fact that the dynamic is the same and that it is a repeat of the previous attempt.

There are 2 clear things that is so common in Europe:

Politics injecting a shit load of public money thinking that if you give the money you will be able to reproduce American company success and co.

In the end, the money is wasted for their own interest by big groups, intermediaries, and opportunists. When the thing fails, it is the fault of no one, it was just "too hard" and "maybe the money budget was not enough for such a subject"

This is totally different to what leads innovation like Google, where you have doers that create something first and when they are able to show or convince that they have breakthrough, money will flow in by itself.

And at the beginning cash is used for brain and development instead of giving big salaries to top management and political friends.

The second thing that is usual is the pattern with this kind of projects:

- corporate sucks all the money

- responsibility is shared between multiple actors to spread the blame in case of problem.

- project fail and corporate give up. "Not their fault"

- one year later the initial hype subject is back on the table (European search engine sovereignty for ex) and politics announce that they will spend that much more money to resolve it

- same corporate vampires starts again from zero...

- and it fails the same in a loop

>- and it fails the same in a loop

Because that's the desired feature, not a bug. The system works just as intended. None of the people at the helm actually believe they can create competitors to US giants, the scope is to funnel public tax money into the right politically connected private industry pockets.

It's just wealth redistribution with a veneer of "sovereignty", similar to large infrastructure projects, except a lot more profitable since more people understand physical infrastructure so it can more easily be scrutinized for corruption, but almost nobody understands IT infrastructure, so it can easily gamed as a bottomless pit for your tax euros that constantly fails in a loop while you socialize the losses and privatize the winnings.

And usually at the end of a public infrastructure project you have something of some benefit to the public, even if there's bad RoI. With tech stuff that goes nowhere at best you have a jobs programme and short-term PR for some politicians.

The fervent wish to only let deserving people get grants results in a huge amount of box-ticking and self-promotion that (in my experience) seems to select for self-promotion parasites rather than people who want to make useful products and get rich from customers rather than government funds.

Yep. Reminds me of how the internet started.

Exactly. The worst thing that can happen for a project like this is that it becomes successful. The goal is that it fails completely, so that politicians and friends can try again in a couple of years with a massive new load of tax payer money. What about the old projects, why did they fail? Those are questions that only traitors and Russian assets would ask.

> Politics injecting a shit load of public money thinking that if you give the money you will be able to reproduce American company success

The problem with public funding is not the what but the to whom?

It works fine if you put the right person in charge.

However, there are very few signals to prevent the wrong person being put in charge, as it removes most considerations / incentivizes private industry uses. Which themselves are already tenuous!

It's not just that there are few signals to prevent the wrong person being put in charge, but this kind of government bureaucratic actively selects for the wrong person. These kinds of government IT projects are often soul sucking to work on, and so they attract a specific kind of applicant.

It's not only that, they would prefer to give a ton of money to a single entity with "market experience" and all the paperwork that looks good already existing. It would work better if it was lots of small amounts of money to individuals with good "business" (think about workplan, expected value and other stuff) but without paperwork - think a kid that just finished studies or a person that acquired experience freelancing and has an interesting business idea but not the money to have the paperwork. Anyway, at least it's how I feel towards the SV "tech".

Sadly, our EU kids are more interested in being the next social media influencer or going on a world trip than grounding a business, because the paperwork and legal burden will age them faster than someone on drugs and will likely get them in hefty fine to bankruptcy due to that one arcane reporting requirement they missed about that €20/- to the tax office.

EU needs something akin to Stripe Atlas, but that is not what the politicians want because they want EU to be manufacturing industry only, you can always import tech from other places … <shaking head emoji here>

Tbf, it's not like this approach can't work at all. Airbus was born out of a similar dynamic, and it's giving Boeing a run for its money now. Afaik France has a couple of other giants in technology-heavy industries such as shipping or mining, but I couldn't speak to their success. What seems clear by now, though, is that the approach isn't suitable for "tech" (in the typical SV sense of the word), especially consumer-centric.

>Tbf, it's not like this approach can't work at all. Airbus was born out of a similar dynamic, and it's giving Boeing a run for its money now.

It literally can't work at all. When was the last time you went and bought an Airbus? Airbus doesn't make consumer products. Passengers are the consumers flying inside them but they're not the ones buying them, it's the airlines who only have a monopoly of 2 global players to choose from in a highly regulated industry with expensive moats to enter meaning Airbus and Boeing don't really need to compete cut-throat.

Governments excel at building large infrastructure and defense companies like Airbus, Boeing, what have you, not at building consumer products at scale like Google, Apple, etc sine their success is dictated by the consumer spending preferences, not by requirements a government makes up.

Communist regimes did not make the best consumer products, the free market did.

Airbus was a company setup by consolidating companies controlled by some of the most powerful countries in the world, which sold planes to captive state airlines and militaries controlled by those same governments and their allies.

What an insane comparison.

I used Qwant a lot in its early phase, but then they decided to become yahoo-esque and also removed the lite version, hence I went back to ddg and brave.

What does yahoo-esque mean in this context?

Before they were lite, now the page is fairly bloated and feels like I am in early days or yahoo/msn instead of google. Sadly same is transpiring in other Bing wrappers(see ecosia-dot-org), no high hopes.

thats usually the case with companies that spout stupid buzz words like this. You know whats not green? A data warehouse storing all those indexes, but that think they can gain followers with their buzz words.

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