Buy European

I would have liked to use it (it's French, like me ;) but since they sell ads and I refuse to see ads (and I'd rather not see my data being collected in order to sell ads)... I don't use them.

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.

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.

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.

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.