Qwant () (The clearest example is at 1:13.) is a French search engine, launched in February 2013. Qwant says that it is focused on privacy, does not track users, resell personal data, or deliberately bias the display of search results. Its results are similar to the Microsoft Bing search engine. However, it is used only in case Qwant lacks information of certain website and for image searches. As of 2023, Qwant could be accessed from around 30 countries.
Both the French Government and the European Parliament use Qwant as the default search engine on their computers, replacing Google in 2020 and 2026 respectively.
Etymology The name Qwant is a combination of , French for , 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 searches but started a gradual transition to its own indexing system starting in February 2013. This process lacked personnel and technology. While Qwant promoted its own engine for indexing social media and "shopping" search results, it continued to rely heavily on external APIs.
In June 2014, the German publishing group Axel Springer invested 20% in Qwant to support the development of a specialized indexing robot for news in French, aimed at competing 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 Deposits and Consignments Fund (CDC), 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.
By early 2019, Qwant was considered to be completely reliant on Bing for web and image searches, producing results entirely through the Bing API as Qwant had neither a crawler nor an indexer at the time.
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 CDC 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) assumed management of Qwant. Rather than aiming to dethrone Google, the new management plans "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.
In 2020, Qwant discontinued its services in several countries but remained available in 39 countries worldwide.
Acquisition by Synfonium
On 11 April 2023, the French entrepreneur announced his intent to acquire Qwant via a newly created holding company, ; the search engine was fully acquired by the company on 24 July.
Partnership with Ecosia and reduced dependency on Microsoft In 2023, Microsoft dramatically raised Bing's search API rates. Since Qwant relied on Bing to provide results for long tail searches, the change forced Qwant to change its business model. In response, Qwant and Germany's Ecosia teamed up to create a 50–50 joint venture called the European Search Perspective (EUSP). Qwant will transfer the search indexing infrastructure it was building as well as some of its engineers and data scientists. Ecosia is making a cash contribution.
In August 2025, EUSP announced that its index named Staan, started to serve queries notably for Qwant's AI summaries while Ecosia planned to use it. Talks were underway with other companies for using the index.
During 2026 edition of VivaTech, Qwant announced the public opening of Staan API which is exclusively targeted towards AI workflows. In this sector, Google giving very limited access while Microsoft announcing the end of Bing Search API, Staan have a chance to seize market shares.
Usage Qwant reported 3.5 million monthly views shortly after its launch, which grew to 17.7 million by February 2016 with traffic doubling in the preceding six months. In May, the site claimed 21 million visits with 50% of visits coming from France and 30% from Germany. In November, 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. It was also reported that Qwant held a 2% market share in France and 1% in Germany.
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.
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.
As of 2024, Qwant reported 6 million users globally.
European Digital Sovereignty In October 2018 the French Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly, announced that her ministry would now use Qwant instead of Google as its default search engine; the French aerospace and defence company Safran later announced in January 2019 that it had also selected Qwant as the new default search engine on the workstations of its 91,000 employees. In an interview with CIO in February, The Chief Information Officer of the company, Loïc Bournon, explained that he had chosen the search engine due to its ethical use of personal data, and to promote the use of European technology. In April, the French national space agency, CNES, also made the move to Qwant for all of its employees at its 4 centres of excellence. The French National Assembly (AN) announced in September that Qwant, rather than Google, would be adopted as the default search engine on the computers of all its services, including those of its deputies. Ultimately, on 7 January 2020, the French Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) instructed that Qwant be installed as the default search engine on all government devices, both desktop and mobile, by 30 April of that year.
On 3 June 2026, the European Parliament announced that from the following day Qwant would become the default search engine used on its computers, replacing Google. Officials stated that the change was "in line with the Parliament's commitment to digital sovereignty and the protection of users' personal data". The move followed pressure by MEPs in November 2025 to reduce the European Parliament's reliance on American technology companies, in favour of European alternatives.
Versions
At its beginnings, Qwant results were categorized and displayed as a mosaic of images and videos on top of five columns: web live: only news sites results Qnowledge graph: mainly Wikipedia information social: only social media results shopping: only e-commerce sites results
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. The five-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.
On 3 December 2019, Qwant announced 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
+ List of Qwant's features Name Active? Description Active years
Search Public search engine 2013 - now
Kids search engine 2016 - now Qwant Pay Payment system Qwant Med & Surgery Healthcare service and VR for surgeons Email provider Never released Qwant Sports Sports search engine Qwant Games Games search engine Qwant Sécurité Civile (Civil security) IT system developed with French government Qwant Home Unknown solution developed in partnership with hardware companies Zero knowledge solution 2019 - 2020
Search engine funding charitable causes 2019 - 2020
Like but for teens Mapping service 2019 - 2024
Open real world data to search engine 2018 - ?
Low-resource consumption version of Qwant 2015 - ?
Music search engine 2016 - 2022
Trackers and cookies blocking browser extension 2022 - ?
Privacy browser extension 2023 - ? VPN VPN ?
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 Qwant does not provide search results when cookies are disabled. 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.
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