Qwant
France
Privacy-first search engine made in France with its own index.
European Alternative to:
A French search engine, around since 2013 and based in Paris. Unlike most smaller engines, Qwant runs its own web crawler and index from France, topping up gaps with Bing results. It doesn't keep your search history to build an ad profile and doesn't do behavioural targeting.
What's different
- Its own index, crawled from France, not just a rebrand of another engine's results
- No tracking: no search-history profiling, no behavioural ad targeting, no cookies that follow you around
- EU-hosted, servers and data stay inside the EU
- Built-in maps, news and shopping tabs alongside the main results
Ownership
Qwant has changed hands a few times. Axel Springer and France's Caisse des Dépôts were early backers; in 2023 it was bought by Octave Klaba, the founder of OVHcloud. In 2024, Qwant and Ecosia set up a joint venture to build a shared European search index.
In practice
It's free and needs no account. Results are fine for everyday queries; the more niche the search, the more you'll notice the smaller index. For people who specifically want a European search engine that crawls the web itself rather than reselling someone else's results, it's one of the few real options.
Germany
United Kingdom
Netherlands