From the EU comes the anti-Google search service Qwant. Qwant has an appealing design and uses first-party indexing robots to scan webpages for results, though it currently also uses APIs from Bing, iTunes, Twitter, and YouTube. Maps are based on the open-source OpenMapTiles, and you can privately save your map history. Qwant also makes a kid-friendly version of its search site called Qwant Junior. My search results using the engine were up to snuff.
Like many other options here, Qwant is getting into the AI act with its Qwant Next tool, but that’s still in beta and only for users logged in to accounts. (I could create an account only after turning off my uBlock filtering, but I still wasn’t able to access the advertised AI search.) As of 2025, Qwant has joined forces with Ecosia (see above) to build a Europe-centric search index to move away from reliance on anonymized Bing and other search index sources. Stay tuned for progress on this new direction.
Although uBlock showed several tracker cookies it deemed worthy of blocking, they were all from the qwant.com domain, which appears in one of uBlock’s block lists. On first use, a dialog box asks if you want the site to use cookies; one choice is to refuse all, which would solve that issue. The Qwant site clearly states, “We do not track or collect our users’ data…When using Qwant, users can be certain that their browsing history isn’t stored, they aren’t profiled, and that they aren’t targeted through personalized ads.”
