A couple of months back, we talked about DuckDuckGo and how privacy isn’t a bad word.
It isn’t, and there is a new challenger if you haven’t heard yet from chic France – Qwant.
Introduced in 2013, Qwant has made a huge impact, now having more than 20 millions monthly users in 30 different countries.
In its tremendous 70% growth year-by-year in MAU, Qwant has established itself as a worthy contender to DuckDuckGo, which has reached a very nice milestone of 14 million searches in a single day.
The main focus of Qwant, similarly to DuckDuckGo, is privacy.
By privacy, it means that Qwant doesn’t collect data on its users and has gone as far as releasing its open source to third-party cyber security firms to confirm that it doesn’t do so.
Qwant also believes that artificial intelligence could be trained to show relevant data to users without actually collecting data on these users.
That’s an interesting philosophy and many users would gladly embrace such a search engine, but without knowing what your users actually desire, can you really learn them?
Remains to be seen, as Qwant would be soon released on mobile as well and is offered as the default search engine for Firefox, a more than worthy contender to Google Chrome.
That’s all nice, but how exactly would Qwant ever be able to defeat Google? By not collecting data? Preposterous!
Wait…Qwant also offers different search categories that you won’t find on Google such as social media, cars and the likes besides images, videos, news, etc.
That’s interesting, as search engines do not show subjects such as that yet, meaning that social media optimization could be transferred to search engine optimization to some degree and exposure on social media could be interpreted to high ranking on search engines.
(In this example, a smart marketer could search for tweets about pizza and deliver tailored ads perhaps on a different search engine to these people)
That isn’t all; Qwant is also in talks to partner with both TripAdvisor as well as eBay for more exposure and perhaps new search categories.
That isn’t something that should be taken lightly on Google or Bing’s behalf, as this does pose a challenge that hasn’t been tackled by these two titans before.
The main drawback of Qwant are the fact that it is only offered on Firefox as a default search engine, not on Chrome or Safari yet.
That’s a hurdle that should be galloped over, as not being featured on the giants means that Qwant would only stay as a niche search engine.
Another drawback that should be tackled ASAP is the fact that the engine only has 12% use on mobile – meaning that most of its users don’t use it on mobile at all and in our world, not being on mobile is a death sentence.
Qwant is here to make a profit, it has rapid growth and it offers something nice and fresh.
How big will it be? We have no idea, but we’ve been surprised before that’s for sure!