this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
76 points (96.3% liked)

Buy European

596 readers
471 users here now

Overview:

The community to discuss buying European goods and services.

European Alternatives

Related Communities:

Buy Local:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Buying and Selling:

[email protected]

Boycott:

[email protected]

founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

Anybody try qwant? I'm giving it a quick try because this is the first I'm hearing about it. Seems alright?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

I've been using it for the past two weeks and its great! In my experience the search results are as good or sometimes better than google. It lacks the AI and tooltips of google so you get less visual bloat and nonesense, but you do have to actually go to one of the results to find your answer, so it takes slightly more time but you also get more/better context.

I tried ecosia and duckduckgo before but ended up going back to google due to the better results. But qwant is much better and i dont see myself going back to google.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

I've been using it for a week, haven't got into a situation yet where I need to go back to Google to find something. Only negative I can say is that the search didn't work a few times, but trying again fixed it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Meh 🤷

They were historically completely dependent on Bing (like most other search engines) and while they continued putting some efforts in building their own index, they're nowhere close to it.

They also recently made a few moves to push advertising and to compromise with privacy (eg. the option to create tracked account to access some AI services).

On the other hands they will probably be more respectful than Google, and the quality of Google's results seems to be degrading faster than Qwant is improving 🤷

I'd guess Ecosia is in a similar situation. I've personally been using Kagi for a while but recent events make me consider moving to a European alternative too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

iirc Ecosia and Qwant were working on a search engine to substitute Google, or at least give it competition

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

I remember hearing about them trying with another european search engine to build up their own search indexer, so I'm hopeful!

I like the UI but atleast for me the search results were not relevant enough to use at work.