An interview with Eric Léandri, head of the European search engine Qwant, has appeared in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau (14.04.2018). He presents his business model. It is especially emphasized that Qwant does not do user tracking and displays results neutrally.
It remains unclear on which database Qwant works: “We are currently working hard to build our own complete index with all pages that are searched during searches in order to offer a real search engine of our own for Europe. “It is likely, however, that data is mainly taken from the Bing interface, although it is officially claimed that there is no formal cooperation between Qwant and Bing: “The general “network” column in Germany is instead a colourful mixture of various publicly accessible network sources, as the meta search engine Duckduckgo does. “(Qwant shows Google the teeth, DW 12.04.2014)
The search results are displayed with their own weighting: “We don’t want to be Google, and we don’t want to copy Google. We’ve been working with our own algorithm for a long time now to list the search results, which has been tested for several years.”
However, the decisive – and therefore also secret – criterion is whether content can be searched promptly and a comprehensive index built up. We remember a search engine Cuil, which was founded by former Google employees. She claimed to have an index three times larger than Google and also not to track user data. Cuil was shut down after two years after the risk capital was used up.