Mozilla didn’t choose privacy. Qwant sends you IP address to Microsoft when you search on their platform. If you want a more responsible search engine, DuckDuckGo is still the way to go.
Update 3: DuckDuckGo also sends along more information than I originally noticed, including “anonymous browser and device information with our hosting and content providers for security and display purposes (for example, that you’re using a mobile device)”
The information collected by Qwant includes…
- hash of the IP address
- User Agent
- market segment of a request
- date and time of the visit
- information of the country and the chosen language
- search keywords
- where a user came from
- type of device used
- source of visit
- operating system
- major browser version
Qwant may (will) transfer to Microsoft:
- your full IP address
- Information about the browser you are using (the User Agent
- The first three bytes of your IP address;
- The approximate geographic area at the origin of the search, at the scale of a region or city;
- The hash generated from your IP address and User Agent
Update 2: removing name and email as that’s only for optional account creation
Update 1: Qwant wants you to disable your ad blocker
doesn’t duckduckgo do the same thing at this point with tracker links? it also uses bing
What tracker links?
DuckDuckGo’s policy is much less specific but makes it a point that they aren’t sending your exact IP address to Microsoft or anybody else for any reason. Among other, IMO even better policies.
we share anonymous browser and device information with our hosting and content providers for security and display purposes (for example, that you’re using a mobile device), but we never share any information with them that could tie your searches or website visits to you personally, or that could allow them to create a history of your individual search queries or the sites you browse.
last we checked they preserved the tracker links bing themselves would use on results, which you had to opt out of.
Can you be more specific?
I would use SearxNG instead, using a public instance like searx.be. It is really lightweight, gets results from multiple indexes and is very privacy-friendly.
Honestly, I set up SearxNG on my own server, and it’s not very nice to use, not very configurable and doesn’t return high quality results. It’s also kinda slow. Maybe I’m missing something?
It is recommended to use a public instance because it makes it harder to fingerprint you off of your searches. It gets most results from Google and Bing, so you will have similar search results. I haven’t experienced any slowness yet, so I can’t say anything about that.
@isVeryLoud @hash0772 I had similar experience. I was able to resolve the slowness by enabling swap on the vps. What was worst is that over time Bing and Google API changed and it stopped working, took quite long troubleshooting. Occasionaly I would hit some kind of rate limit and got nothing from Google. It was too much hassle and not worth the vps cost.
Cost is whatever since this VPS is being used for other things.
I’m a bit confused about swap solving things though since it’s unlikely to be a memory issue.
@isVeryLoud It was for me, I monitored the server and each query would bump up the memory quite a bit. But that sucker had only 512 MB I think. It could’ve been some issue that’s already fixed with newer Searx versions.
Ah that would definitely be it, my VPS has 4 GB of RAM and runs other services just fine. I set it up about a month ago.
You can try it yourself: https://searx.veryloud.ca/
I’m sorry but that is not correct. In the link that you shared to their privacy statement it is explicitly stated that they do not collect your identity when using the service. They say that your identity " is the information we use to ensure that you are who you say you are when you make a de-listing request, report or create an account. This includes: first name, last name, email address."
Furthermore, unlike duckduckgo which to my knowledge relies entirely on Bing’s search index, Qwant does actually index the web itself and only uses the Bing index when a search returns insufficient hits from their own index. When they query the microsoft index they send the following data along: “Search keywords; Information about the browser you are using (the User Agent); The first three bytes of your IP address; The approximate geographic area at the origin of the search, at the scale of a region or city; The salty hash generated from your IP address, your User Agent and a salt changing no later than every 3 months; A random token generated by Qwant (aiming to limit data cross-checking).”
I do not know much about DuckDuckGo, but from an initial read the privacy policy is much more vague than Qwant’s, not mentioning any specific information that is shared. As they are a US company, they are also not covered by the general data protection regulation.
In general, both search engines seem to do a good job at protecting users’ privacy, which to me sounds like something that should be encouraged, not polluted with misinformation.
You’re probably wondering why I say “your full IP address” versus “partial IP address”; you quote the policy correctly but you missed a separate but crucial section in the privacy policy:
In addition, for security purposes and reliability of our partner’s services (detection of spam, automated activity, fraudulent clicks on advertisements …), Qwant may also collect and transfer to this partner [Microsoft Ireland] your full IP address.
The transfer happens separately from searches, sure, but if two requests get sent to Microsoft at the same time and with the same parsable information (the full IP address from the security query can be used to link a partial IP address and city-level location from a search query) then it seems like Qwant is giving Microsoft the ability, even if unintentionally, to link IP address and search.
I do not know much about DuckDuckGo, but from an initial read the privacy policy is much more vague than Qwant’s, not mentioning any specific information that is shared. As they are a US company, they are also not covered by the general data protection regulation.
I agree and I’ll add a disclaimer or something. DuckDuckGo says this:
In order for our product to function, we share anonymous browser and device information with our hosting and content providers for security and display purposes (for example, that you’re using a mobile device )*
Fair points. Thank you for amending your comment 👍. I wonder in which situations Qwant sends the full IP address specifically. The wording is a bit vague
Any company doing business with EU residents has to comply with GDPR, even if it is not from the EU.
DuckDuckGo claims to also use more than just Bing.
what are you making misleading claims about Qwant for??? if you click your own damn link you’ll see that the only case where they need to collect your name is if you make an account (completely unnecessary), make a de-listing request (to verify that you are who you say you are before removing something, otherwise i could just go and have jeff bezos removed), or if you report something.
also, 80% of your bullet points after “user agent” are redundant because they are literally just what makes up a user agent. newsflash: every single website you ever visit in your life collects your user agent because it needs to know whether to give you the mobile or the desktop version of the site. this has nothing to do with privacy in this case, you’re just slandering to slander
I updated my comment to remove name and email. But I maintain the stuff after “user agent” isn’t redundant because part of it is your IP address and another part is your location, neither of which appear to be included in your browser user agent string.
They’re getting the location from your IP
Thank you for informing us. This is what I wanted to know.
DuckDuckGo is US-based and founded by the person who previously founded “The Names Database”.
Pass. Qwant has had its share of controversies, regardless their results aren’t better than DDG.
If Mozilla was serious about this they would run their own Searx instance and let people choose what engines they wanted to use.
Reading through the current Qwant privacy policy certainly doesn’t alleviate any privacy concerns either…
Mozilla keeps building/buying, then abandoning things. I’m not sure if they’re cut out for that project, and in my experience a SearX instance’s effectiveness is mostly based on whether there are enough users for the data to be obfuscated, but so few that it doesn’t get rate limited…
Certainly some things are rate limited, Brave and Startpage are particularly bad for this. I omit them from my endjinns in Searx settings.
If you can use Google through SearX, isn’t Startpage redundant? IIRC they don’t ever claim to do anything but proxy Google results.
isn’t Startpage redundant?
After they were purchased by an advertising company? Yes.
Yes, except in the case where Google is rate limited. There is/was a Searx instance that regularly got blocked by Google, I do not remember which one though.
Is this instance of searx safe (I cannot self host) Also how is its privacy and performance compared to DDG?
What I linked to is a listing of public Searx instances. You can look at the list and see things like uptime, where they are hosted, etc.
For performance I find it much better than DDG. In the settings page you can choose which search engines you wish to use, for example Brave, Stract, and Qwant. You can also tailor results by adding things like Lemmy, F-Droid, and Anna’s Archive.
Wtf is Qwant?
Edit: oh, OK, it’s a search engine. Next questions, what is the nature of the “partnership” and how is this better or different than DDG?
how is this better or different than DDG?
Qwant is using its own index
plus Bing. If I remember DDG only using Bing’s index and DDG started to censored results in 2022.Sometimes better search results than DDG (but about the same), EU based (France), offers a Openstreetmap based alternative to google maps (opposed to ddg using Apple Maps) and a slightly worse privacy policy are the main differences
what is the nature of the “partnership”
The partnership is entirely of monetary nature. Like all “partnerships” Mozilla has with 3rd parties that are integrated into Firefox.
That is their business concept. Those companies pay high amounts of money, and Mozilla adds their links into the browser or sends them “anonymized” usage statistics for advertisement purposes.
Right, then the question is, what’s Qwant’s business model. Where do they get the money from to send to Mozilla? I’m just always so suspicious that the users are the ones getting burned
what’s Qwant’s business model.
They sell search queries and meta data (IP address,user agent, etc.) to Microsoft for advertising purposes.
Too bad about the choice for qwant. I’ve been using them for many years and they have big flaws: they block visits from unsupported countries, so if you’re traveling, you’re fucked. They also started blocking ad blocking users and their main webpage is full of crap that you have to disable manually. Their support is non existing. And they use the same censorship as Microsoft. I moved to brave search recently
Searxng and you live happily
Looks interesting but I tried it and like most alternative engines, it’s bad and showing regional results for me. It’s good for English based searches but not in my lingo
Have you tried Kagi?
No, first time I hear about it
It’s a paid search engine, so their only priority is serving you good search results. It feels like using google before the 2012-ish enshittification.
Removed by mod
Thanks that solves it
There’s no way Mozilla is replacing Google as the default, so what are they actually announcing here? I didn’t read any actual results thats happening. Are they just adding Qwant as an option in the search engine settings?
This part of the post suggests that Qwant will not become the default search engine, but given the millions that Mozilla gets from Google it should not surprise anyone.
Did you know you could choose the search engine of your choice right from your Firefox URL bar?
This means Google isn’t paying the millions to be the default anymore??
Seems to be an awful news then, that money was useful for development and a default is trivial to change
I didn’t see a line that suggests they’re putting Qwant as default, only that they’re making it available as a search provider, just as DuckDuckGo and others are.
They say:
Did you know you could choose the search engine of your choice right from your Firefox URL bar?
Has anyone here used Qwant? I’ve seen it mentioned a handful of times but I’ve not tried it myself.
I had used it for a while in the past. The results were surprisingly good. I have moved to other search engines to experiment since then, but I have nothing bad to say about my time with Qwant.
Which search engines do you use now?
Brave Search currently, but I am still in the experimenting and search engine-hopping phase. Henceforth, Brave Search is not my final search engine, either.
Interesting. Which other ones have you tried? I’d be interesting in hearing what you thought of all of them!
I was trying Kagi but I’m put off it now that they’re partnering with Brendan Eich. I don’t think I’d use Brave search, for the same reason.
@dan I see, what’s the problam with Brendan Eich, is he the former Firefox CEO?
I’ve been experimenting with other search engines recently so might give it a go.
I’ve used it a long time now. I find it to have much more relevant results than DDG did last time I tried.
That’s because it gives a whole lot more data to Microsoft than DDG does.
I would love to but it’s still unavailable in my country :/
Doesn’t Mozilla rely on Google for default search? Does this change that relationship?
Doesn’t Mozilla rely on Google for default search?
and money…mainly the money.
Does this change that relationship?
Unknown at this time.
Yeah… Things like this partnership, plus publishing posts against things Google is doing (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/googles-protected-audience-protects-advertisers/), might spook Google a bit. Mozilla rely on receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from Google every year. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
The fact that Mozilla is so dependent on Google is the actual problem here, diversifying where they get funding from is precisely what they should be doing going forward.
Mozilla has diversified… By jumping into AI.
- Spent $65-265 million on AI that we know of
- Bought an AI company for an undisclosed sum and funded more AI research for unknown amounts
- Brought AI to Kenya (in a move strangely reminiscent of cryptocurrency companies trying to fix the “unranked” problem
And shuttering previous diversification products and laying off staff.
Saw that, totally can’t imagine how any of that is going to backfire.
I definitely agree with you, but finding another partner to get hundreds of millions of dollars per year isn’t trivial.
Sure, but finding more partners is crucial for long term survival, so if Mozilla never reaches out to anybody for fear of offending Google then they’re always gonna be stuck in this sort of abusive relationship. Becoming so reliant on Google in the first place shouldn’t have happened, but it’s better to start fixing that sooner than later. It’s also worth noting that the main reason Google funds FF is to protect themselves from antitrust litigation. As long as FF is around and gets a bit of usage, then Google can point to it to say that Chrome isn’t a browser monopoly.
But is Qwant going to be default?
It started appearing in my search engines list after every update and I remove it from the list every time.
Why?
Because thats imposed and I find myself comfortable with DDG. If I wanted Qwant, I would have added it myself.
Why should they keep adding it every update?
this is sick, love qwant and hope this gives them more resources
