Why you should try Qwant for your searches
Qwant, the French search engine. Today, the three biggest search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing. They know everything about you, even the searches you want to keep secret. There’s no doubt that government agencies are able to obtain the contents and know you better than you know your parents. Do you want to go […]
Qwant, the French search engine. Today, the three biggest search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing. They know everything about you, even the searches you want to keep secret. There’s no doubt that government agencies are able to obtain the contents and know you better than you know your parents. Do you want to go into politics one day? A “leak” could put you on the front page of the newspapers.
However, Qwant, a new privacy-protecting search engine, is making lightning progress. I’ve tried it out and offer my thoughts.
The advantages of Qwant, the French search engine
Qwant is a French search engine that got off to a rather rocky start, but is now exploding worldwide in reaction to the monopoly of today’s big engines. Initially considered unreliable, specialists now regard it as excellent.
- Its most important advantage is that it protects the privacy of searches by leaving no cookies, an aspect that will become increasingly important for Internet users with the arrival of “big data”.
- You’ll no longer be bombarded with remarketing ads after visiting a site that keeps track of you and keeps trying to offer you what you didn’t want to buy during your visit.
- The quality of its searches is now more or less on a par with other search engines.
- They don’t search for the same thing: Google is said to allow you to search for what you know, whereas Qwant allows you to find what you don’t know.
- Cooler, more colorful presentation than Google
- You can search on several Qwant engines at the same time: web, news, social, photo.it’s particularly pleasant to search on a subject with the 3 columns web, news and social on the same page for good coverage of the same subject, not to mention photos horizontally above.
- The social networking category is a lot of fun and interesting.
- The sidebar for photos, videos and music provides easy access to different sources of information.
- Last but not least, Qwant is not only a French search engine, but also a European one, and has already been adopted by a number of French administrations.
What I like less
- The web search page is “cooler” but doesn’t seem as clear as Google, so maybe it’s a matter of getting used to it.
- Some people feel that Qwant is a little slower to search, but I honestly couldn’t tell.
SEO and digital marketing
The searches carried out show differences in the algorithm, with some pages of the site tested ranking higher, others lower, and it’s hard to say where the differences lie.
Web marketing agencies will therefore be unable to use remarketing campaigns, since cookies are banned and user history does not exist. They will have to content themselves with optimizing natural referencing, working on social networking presence and designing Adwords campaigns in the web search section.
The future
The question of survival versus the monsters is the ability to improve in stop and evolve in a constantly changing world, but make no mistake Qwant’s goal is to one day replace Google, data protection is a growing concern for Internet users, and trends change very quickly on the web!
Jean-Pierre Mercier
Our SEO training