# Qwant

Qwant (/kwɑ̃t/) is a French search engine that launched in February 2013. Qwant says that it is focused on privacy, does not track users, resell personal data, or bias the display of search results. Its results are largely based on Microsoft's Bing search engine.

## Etymology

The name Qwant stems from a combination of the letter Q from the word Quantities and the English word want.

## History
### Creation

Qwant was created on May 25, 2011 in Nice by investors Jean-Manuel Rozan, Éric Léandri, and Patrick Constant (via his company Pertimm, which developed other search engines for retail and other commercial services).
The metasearch engine was launched in beta in 15 countries and 35 languages on 16 February 2013, and in its final version on 4 July 2013 in its French localization.

### Development

In its initial phase, Qwant used Bing’s API for its searches but began reducing its use in a transition to their own indexing (supplemented by other sources). This process 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 the first passage of their Qwant bot only from the end of 2014. They provided results based 100% on a Bing API, because then they had neither a crawler nor indexer, as imposed by the API CGUs.
The German publishing group Axel Springer invested 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 14 April 2015, Qwant unveiled a new version of its search engine with an updated graphical interface.
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 reach in Europe.
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.
On 4 July 2018, a new, more streamlined version of Qwant was unveiled, version four; its logo was also changed for this new version.

#### Restructuring

In May 2019, Qwant announced that it would migrate its servers to an infrastructure based on Microsoft Azure, and also keep some of its indexing capacity on its infrastructure.
In January 2020, Jean-Claude Ghinozzi became the CEO of Qwant, replacing Éric Léandri.
At the end of June 2020, Qwant began restructuring. The closure of its Épinal and Ajaccio offices was announced to meet a requirement from major shareholders, the Caisse des dépôts et consignations and Axel Springer.
In 2020, Qwant's net sales increased by 28% to €7.5 million. Losses fell to €13 million from €23.5 million in 2019.

#### New direction

In 2021, Raphaël Auphan (managing director) and Corinne Lejbowicz (President) took over the management of Qwant.
The new management ceases to aim to dethrone Google and plans "rather to build step by step a real ecosystem of private and secure navigation on the Internet."
According to the new executives, the old Qwant shone by its opacity:
* the company kept the blur on its actual use
* minimized its use of Bing
* was divided into a dozen legal structures according to the new management, which concealed the extent of the problems.
In early 2022, a new executive committee composed the management of Qwant: Laurent Ach CTO, Flore Blanchard-Dignac, CMO and Amélie Mathieu, CFO.
Qwant also discontinued its services in several countries but remained available in 39 countries worldwide.

## Versions

The 5-year-anniversary version launched in 2018 eliminated the column-based presentation in favor of a more web-friendly presentation. The different types of current/social research remained accessible through a side menu.
In June 2017, a version adapted to the Swiss culture was launched and offered in three of the four national languages: German, French, and Italian.
In January 2018, Qwant announced its expected arrival in China by the summer of 2018, in partnership with local authorities and companies to adapt it to Chinese laws.
On 3 December 2019, Qwant announced via Twitter the arrival of a new design to "simplify the experience and bring new experiences".
In March 2021, a new version was made available online to rejuvenate the interface and make it more accessible on smartphones.
In June 2022, Qwant unveiled a new identity to engage new hearings on the importance of personal data protection.

## Features

Qwant offers several types of results in the same search: classic websites, merchant websites, news webs not based on information related to the user's profile.
In its early days, the Qwant search engine relied on Bing to provide more relevant results.
In 2016, Qwant claimed to be increasingly using its own results from its own exploration robots as a hybrid engine.
In 2020, Qwant claimed to have exceeded 50% of independent results for web searches, and 70% for all researchs.

## Business model

Qwant's business model is partly based on cost-per-click through contextual advertising.
It also has partnerships with companies such as TripAdvisor, PagesJaunes and DeepL. These serve to enrich the results, such as by DeepL providing its translation service directly on the Qwant results page.
Qwant's results are further augmented by the integration of application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by third-party companies, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

### Privacy

The only cookies Qwant installs are for core functionality and not for advertising.
Local storage is also used to save the search engine's parameters, such as the theme, filtering parameters, and the language.
The results displayed are not customized according to a search history, as with Google, but instead depend on the general trends of the moment.
Since mid-2016, Qwant has been sending data to Microsoft Bing Ads to respond to requests—specifically, the IP/24 of the user, the User-Agent of their browser, and the search keywords.
These data were not anonymized but pseudonymized. This was done without informed consent of its users. It did not announce this until mid-2021.

## Partnerships
### Mozilla Foundation

On 4 July 2016, Qwant announced a global partnership with the Mozilla Foundation.
A new version of the Firefox web browser resulted from this partnership, specifically optimized for the use of Qwant.
On 2 August 2016, a mobile version was 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.
Qwant's extension for Mozilla Firefox is on the list of free software recommended by the French State as part of the overall modernization of its information systems. While it is published under MIT/X11 license, the engine itself is not open source.

### Inria

Qwant partnered with Inria for research on Internet research technologies that respect privacy.

### Wiko

On 27 March 2019, a partnership between Qwant and Wiko was announced.
Wiko launched a new version of its View 2 Pro with Qwant as its default search engine, becoming the first Android phone to not use Google as the default.
This was made possible thanks to the decision of Margrethe Vestager in July 2018 to impose a fine of €4.34 billion on Google for abuse of its dominant position within the Android operating system.

### Fairphone

Qwant announced that it would be the default search engine in the Fairphone 2 smartphone, after partnering with Fairphone.

### Samsung

On 12 May 2020, Samsung Internet announced a partnership with Qwant to globally deploy the search engine.

### Huawei

Huawei chose Qwant as the default search engine on its P40 smartphone in France, Germany, and Italy, in response to US sanctions.
In May 2021, Qwant's CEO asked shareholders for permission to borrow €8 million from Huawei.

### Lexibook

In September 2018, Qwant and Lexibook announced the offering of Qwant products (including Qwant Junior) on LexiTab tablets.

### Brave

Qwant became the default search engine for the Brave browser in France and Germany.

### Villes Internet

At the end of August 2018, Qwant created Elunum, a search engine for elected officials and territorial agents. This engine was made in cooperation with Villes Internet.

### HelloAsso

On 14 May 2019, Qwant Causes was launched in partnership with HelloAsso, which was responsible for donations payment.

### Qobuz

A partnership was signed with the music streaming and downloading service Qobuz, allowing CD-quality online listening of tracks recommended by the search engine in France.

### DeepL

Qwant launched the first privacy-friendly translation service on its search engine, in partnership with DeepL.
It is possible to translate 28 languages from the Qwant search page.

## Acquisitions & use of technology
### Xilopix

In November 2017, Qwant bought Xilopix, a company based in Lorraine and publisher of the search engine Xaphir, which was experiencing financial difficulties

### Nvidia

In April 2017, Qwant announced it was acquiring Nvidia brand supercomputers for deep learning to refine its research results and to rent its computers to startups that needed to use these technologies.

### Fleksy

Qwant entered a partnership with Fleksy that integrated the search engine into the Fleksy virtual keyboard.

### Easyvoyage

Qwant partnered with travel comparison site Easyvoyage to supply results for flight and hotel research.

### Ecosia

In November 2024, Qwant announced that it had partnered with Ecosia in a joint-venture to build the European Search Index, a search index created to provide more localized search results in the French and German languages, and to reduce the reliance on Bing and Google.

## Controversies
### Privacy approach

Qwant was originally a meta-search engine that presented itself as a search engine. Two audits of the Interdepartmental Digital Directorate (Dinum) in July and September 2019 revealed that Qwant did have an index, but that it was not directly related to users' requests, according to LeMediaTV.
According to co-founder Éric Léandri, Qwant does not want to compete with Google, but simply "show something different".
When launched in February 2013, Qwant did not advertise itself as privacy-focused. This would be because the door of American venture capital could not be opened for risk of an inevitable and feared technical audit, in conjunction with the Snowden outbreak in June 2013, which highlights general Internet surveillance, which provides an exit strategy for Qwant.

### Dependence on Bing

Due to its results being very similar to Bing and Wikipedia, a new version of the engine was published in April 2015, still based on the Bing API, but without clearly displaying it as required by the Bing API.
With dated results, the technical appendix of the first audit notes inconsistencies in cache management and cannot exclude situations where all cached data can come from the Bing API and not from Qwant's internal robots, especially since the team does not know precisely how to answer questions about the exact sequence of treatments, nor how to quantify its actual level of use of Bing.
In the summer of 2016, in preparation for an audit conducted by the Caisse des dépôts et consignations with a view to an entry into the capital of Qwant, a code amendment to reduce the use of the Bing API took place a few days before the audit.
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 disputed 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.
On 25 September 2019, the French interministerial Digital Directorate assessed in a technical audit report that Qwant's dependency on Microsoft Bing was at 64%.

### CEO conduct

In September 2019, NextInpact revealed that CEO Éric Léandri threatened Qwant employees at the end of 2016.
In March 2017, after fundraising with the participation of the Caisse des dépôts et consignations, and after the refusal of funding by Bpifrance because of this strong dependence on Bing's API, new press articles touched on Qwant's use of several technologies, algorithms, and advertising governance, provided by Microsoft.

### Logo similarity with Google

In its early stages, the similarity of its first logo with that of Google was pointed out.
A few days after its launch in July 2013, it was accused by the designers of the Canadian search engine GooL.li, launched in 2012, of plagiarizing its interface.
Mohamed Kahlain, co-founder of GooL.li, announced that he did not want to sue Qwant and said that he was not aware of the interface change.
In March 2017, Qwant, through the Open Internet Project, of which it is a member, accused Google of anti-competitive practices and filed a complaint with the European Commission in Brussels.

### Miscellaneous

In July 2019, La Lettre A revealed that Qwant had been questioned by its main shareholder Caisse des dépôts et Consignations on Qwant's twenty highest salaries; the letter talks about wages that are “manifestly indecent”.

### CNIL and the Qwant - Microsoft Partnership

In February 2025, the CNIL issued a legal reminder to Qwant, stating that the data processed by the search engine to Microsoft was personal data rather than anonymous data.

## Functionality
### Research

With a new design released in 2022, the goal is to educate new audiences, especially younger ones, on the importance of protecting personal data.
The homepage has a space dedicated to content about the challenges of protecting digital personal data. A horizontal strip houses the search bar as well as to access other services of the brand such as news.
Based on a given request, Qwant will highlight direct access to information insert, for clearer and faster information. The Lite version is always accessible.

### Qwick

Similar to DuckDuckGo, Qwant allows performing redirect queries to other search engines or sites by typing the corresponding command called Qwick.

## Active services
### Qwant Lite

On 5 October 2015, Qwant unveiled a Lite version of its search engine, intended for older browsers, aging terminals, and low-speed Internet connections.
This streamlined version of the website did not use JavaScript or CSS3, technologies deemed too resource-consuming.

### Qwant Junior

Qwant Junior is a search engine for children aged 6–12 with no advertising, e-commerce and NSFW elements. Since 2018, it is available on Android and iOS mobile devices.
It launched experimentally in several French schools in January 2015, in partnership with the French National Education, and was released as a final version in February 2015.
Since March 2023, Qwant Junior has partnered with the BayaM app, designed by publishers Bayard Jeunesse and Milan, to offer educational content to children aged 6–12.

### Qwant Music

Qwant Music is a search engine for albums and artists developed in collaboration with Ircam and Qobuz.
On 3 June 2016, the beta version of Qwant Music is launched, enabling searching for artists, albums and titles.
In September 2017, Qwant Music was detached as a subsidiary based in Ajaccio, Corsica.
On 8 June 2018, the final version of Qwant Music was released.

### Qwant VIPrivacy

Qwant VIPrivacy is a browser extension for blocking trackers and cookies when browsing the internet, while using Qwant as the browser's default search engine.

### Qwant@Work

Qwant@Work is a service dedicated to businesses, administrations, and organizations, enabling them to protect the navigation of their employees by limiting the collection of personal data.
The extension installs Qwant as the default search engine.
The service was launched in January 2023.

## Discontinued services
### Masq by Qwant

Masq by Qwant was a personal data storage service designed to personalize Qwant's service to users without collecting personal data.
It was initially released as an alpha version on 27 June 2019 and later discontinued on 17 September 2020, because it "does not meet the expectations of most users".

### Qwant Causes

At the MWC in Barcelona, from 25–28 February 2019, Qwant unveiled Qwant Causes.
Similar in concept to Lilo and Ecosia, it was a search engine that allowed funding a project while conducting searches respecting the privacy of the users of not wishing to create an account.
The service was launched in partnership with HelloAsso, which offered its beneficiary associations to benefit from the service.
On the results pages of a query, more advertisements were displayed to fund these associations of general interest, without impacting Qwant's revenue.
The service was discontinued on 30 April 2020, because of "insufficient use of societal and associative issues addressed".

### Qwant Boards

Qwant Boards allowed the sharing of images, videos, websites, or messages.
On 27 August 2020, publishing new notebooks and accessing other users' notebooks was disabled, and user data was made available for download until a year later.
The company's explained concerning the shutdown of this service:
   "We are aware that this service could be useful to you, however, the closure of Qwant Boards will allow all Qwant teams to focus even more on improving the Qwant search engine and creating new features and services that we believe will also please you."

### Qwant Junior Education

This was a version of Qwant Junior where teachers of French National Education could open a session through their academic email address.

### Qwant School

Qwant School was a filtered version of the Qwant search engine designed for teens, especially middle school students.
Like Qwant Junior, it did not display any advertising, online commerce links, or any violent or pornographic content to be displayed, although its filters were otherwise somewhat less restrictive

### Qwant Maps

Qwant Maps mapping service, based on OpenStreetMap, was released in alpha version on 4 December 2018.
The service went into beta on 27 June 2019, and came out in a final version in 2021.
Qwant Maps had most of the features of a classic online map, namely finding routes (by car, on foot, by bike, and by public transport), and places of interest (services, shops, and activities).
On 20 May 2024, Qwant announced on X that they were discontinuing Qwant Maps, replacing it with a "Maps module" integrated into the engine.

### Qwant IoT

At VivaTech in May 2018, Qwant announced Qwant loT, the development of a search engine for the Internet of Things, in partnership with Kuzzle.

### QwantMed

QwantMed was a tool to protect private medical data.

## Usage

Qwant became the default search engine for the French Ministry of armies' computer stations on 2 October 2018.
On 30 January 2019, the aeronautical company Safran standardized the use of Qwant as a search engine within the company.
In April 2019, the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) decided to use Qwant as the default search engine for all collaborators of its four centers of excellence, including the launch site of Ariane 5 and Ariane 6, the Guiana Space Centre, Europe's spaceport.
The French administration announced that Qwant would be the default search engine on all its computer stations by 30 April 2020.

## Popularity

In July 2013, a week after its launch, Qwant claimed 3.5 million monthly views.
In February 2016, it claimed 17.7 million monthly visits and reported that traffic doubled in the previous six months.
In May 2016, the site claimed one million visits with 50% of visits coming from France and 30% from Germany.
In November 2016, it claimed nearly 27 million monthly visits and 37 million at the beginning of 2017.
At the end of July 2017, Qwant claimed 40 million monthly visits.
In June 2018, Qwant claimed to be the second most used search engine in France, and to have entered the top 50 most visited websites in France and the top 1,000 worldwide.
This information is confirmed by the SimilarWeb site, but contradicted by the StatCounter site, which instead supports these figures: between June 2017 and June 2018, Qwant is the fifth search engine in France in terms of market share, with 0.55% against 90.99% for Google.
In October 2018, in an interview for Usine nouvelle magazine, for the “Nugget of the Year” award, Qwant explained the evolution of its popularity: 2.6 billion requests in 2016, 9.7 billion in 2017, and 18 billion in 2018.
In 2018, this would amount to 1.6 billion requests per month.
In April 2018, nearly 81% of its traffic came from France, followed by Germany (5%) and Italy (2%).
In the first half of 2020, Qwant was the fourth most popular search engine in France, behind Google, Bing and Yahoo, and ahead of Ecosia and DuckDuckGo.
In August 2020, 79% of its traffic came from France, 7% from Germany, and 3% from the United States.
As of February 2021, according to SimilarWeb, 51.78% of its traffic (38.7 million searches) is from France, 10.96% from the US, 9.23% from Germany, 2.81% from Canada, and 2.76% from Italy.

## Reception

France's Minister of Economics Emmanuel Macron called Qwant the "French Google".

## Privacy advocacy

In September 2021, Qwant became available in all European countries and made it to the top 5 search engines available on Android phones. The European Commission signed the "choice screen" on Android phones teams in June 2021, and Qwant contributed to the passage of this resolution.
On 25 November 2021, Qwant publicly announced its contribution to the development of the "Manifesto of French startups" by the association France Digitale, intending to bring concrete proposals related to digital for the 2022 presidential election.
In January 2023, for Data Privacy Day, Qwant released the first edition of its online privacy barometer alongside Proton, Murena and Olvid.