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Mozilla didn’t choose privacy. Long story short, this is much less private than DuckDuckGo.

The information collected by Qwant includes

  • first name, last name, email address
  • 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:

  • 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
About QwantPrivacy Policy - About QwantLearn more about Qwant's Privacy Policy

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.

searx.beSearx BelgiumSearXNG — a privacy-respecting, open metasearch engine

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?

@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.

Beam me out!

@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: searx.veryloud.ca

searx.veryloud.casearxngSearXNG — a privacy-respecting, open metasearch engine