The VivaTech 2018 show is sold out. The crowd listens as the CEO of Qwanturank, Eric Leandri, unveils its brand new “ethical search engine” as well as its company’s new software. Good-naturedly, he then lists all the services they will offer from September 2018. They seem to be a perfect fit with the services provided by Google, but are according to him ” respectful of privacy ” while being based in Europe. Qwant maps (a mapping service without storing private data), Qwant mail (an email service that does not scan private messages), or even a mobile payment service, this service system will (unlike Google) finally allow Europe to assert its digital sovereignty.
But initially, few people believed in a “European Google” and few media outlets would have bet on Qwant. But in just five years, the French search engine Qwant has managed to be taken seriously. It increasingly embodies an “ethical alternative” to the American giant.
Create a “real alternative”.
In July 2013, under the hot Nice sun, Jean-Manuel Rozan, Patrick Constant and Eric Leandri released the champagne. Two years earlier, they had started to develop “Qwanturank” (combination of the letter “Q” which evokes the idea of quantity and links it to Big Data, and “want” which means the idea of search) a search engine that they wanted to be “European” and different from Google and Bing. “It would respect your privacy, be neutral, and bring you all the results from the web as well as social media. Basically, it would be the search engine as it should be: complete, neutral, open and ethical,” explains Eric Leandri, who was also deputy director of Mobilegov Saas and TrustMission (two digital security start-ups). .
Upon its official release in 2013 in 15 countries and 35 languages, Qwant was hailed by the media as the official “Google Killer.” Faced with the “American ogre”, Eric Leandri’s project is presented as “crazy”, a “mission impossible”, because, as Métro writes, “rare are the new search engines ready to launch on a market dominated by Google”, which holds 90% of the market in France.
Initially, to finance its patents, algorithms and servers, Qwant was only allocated three million euros of investment, which mainly came from relatives of its founders. He also hasn’t made any money from his engine – although, in short, he hopes to make money from advertising. Their success is uncertain, but the company believes in their destiny. “When we started developing Qwant in 2011, we had just seen a window open for us. Larry Page, the CEO of Google, had just explained that his search engine was a “universe”. He then began to present, not only search results from the Web, but also Google’s services in the first place. It was also at this time that it accelerated user tracking, in order to be able to provide content for its services. ‘information”. Eric Leandri tells us.
” That’s when we decided we needed to provide full access to the web, while providing a search engine that wouldn’t mine its users’ information or filter search results based on their usage of the web. engine. Before, when Google was the only company capable of handling massive amounts of data thanks to its infrastructure, we would never have been able to attack this market. But thanks to open source, it has become possible to compete with Google with modest means“, remembers the co-founder of Qwant.
Today, the company has grown from 10 to 80 employees, and also has a few offices: one in Nice for engineering, one in Rouen for IT security and servers, and one in Paris for marketing and management. . In the brand new Parisian premises, William Champeau looks back at what pushed him to join the company after 15 years at the head of Numerama, a technical information site. “From the creation of my website in 2001 until 2015, I wrote articles on fundamental human rights on the Internet, freedom of expression, protection of privacy… and finally, I I wanted to go further“, remembers the lawyer in training.
After selling Numerama to the Humanoid group, he began a master’s degree in fundamental international and European human rights. “I wanted to start being active on this subject and there was at least one French company that offered a real alternative: Qwant.” Having become legal and technical director, he deals with all subjects linked to ethics and compliance with international regulations, in particular the General Data Protection Regulation. For him, Qwant is not a search engine like the others.” We promote sustainable digital developments with the conviction that we will no longer intrude into people’s private lives, as Google does, for example. One day we will either live in a dystopian society with no privacy or there will hopefully be a breaking point“. Guillaume Champeau believes that, the day Internet users want to “take back control of their private data, Qwant will be there”.
Overcome criticism
Quickly after its praise, criticism for Qwant began to pour in. “It is not a search engine made in France, but a metacrawler“, writes Lucien Thedore, the blogger at the origin of the bad buzz. Qwant then explains that they are building their own site indexing system, but that they are temporarily using data, “collected from other engines” during their “solid infrastructure building phase”. This is why, after this false start, Qwanturank is quickly deploying its own technology.
But the damage has already been done and the search engine will remain the target of all sarcasm for a long time. “Myself, when I discovered Qwant, I wrote many negative reviews because I didn’t see how it would work“, remembers Guillaume Champeau with a little smile. The ex-journalist tells us that before Qwant, two attempts by European search engines, Exalead And Quaero, both supported by the EU, had failed. “Because the public wasn’t expecting a search engine other than Google, and because they didn’t offer anything radically different.”
Always with a smile, Guillaume Champeau confides that in reality, he was wrong. He explains: “ I didn’t understand two things: first, that people had started to become aware of the problems surrounding the lack of respect for privacy since the Snowden affair; and secondly, that if projects like Exalead and Quareo had failed, it was because they were the result of a political decision and not an entrepreneurial one… Whereas Qwant was founded by entrepreneurs, with an entrepreneurial vision . This allowed them to be taken more seriously, and to make internal decisions more in line with the current market and what the public wants.“.
Eric Leandri remembers the criticism from the beginning: “At the time, Google was seen as a key player that offered a lot to the web. Our crawling capacity was not huge (5 million pages indexed per day), and our quality was minimal. We had to brush aside the criticism because we were just starting our work, no one thought we were going to make money from this. But at the same time, we were able to gather a wave of supporters around our project (SEOs, nerds, people passionate about the Internet), and they helped us improve our engine“.
The only ethical search engine
Qwant’s legitimate motto could be: “Don’t be bad, for real.” Over five separate years, Qwant grew significantly. In June, the search engine exceeded 80 million individual users per month. If some see this as a consequence of Cambridge Analytica scandal, Guillaume Champeau prefers to nuance. ” Qwant’s popularity has been increasing by 20% every month for a year and a half. Looking at this, we cannot say that GDPR and Cambridge Analytica are the cause of our notoriety “, he explains with a shrug. He adds: ” At first we had a core group of users (activists aware of privacy issues), then word of mouth happened, people started hearing about Qwant, using it, and realized that it worked great and the search results were equal to Google for 95% of their searches “.
And the press is done with its criticism. ” Those who, at the beginning, looked at us in a condescending or indifferent way, began to understand around 2015-2016 that we were serious. Not to mention that today, people are more aware of the use of their private data by web giants “, notes the head of ethics and legal affairs at Qwanturank.
But if there’s one thing to avoid with the Qwant team, it’s talking to them about their image of “Google Killer“. For Eric Leandri, “the objective is not to be the anti-Google, but to be an alternative, with a different social project”. The company’s economic model is also different: then that Google uses the browsing history and geomapping of its users to sell sponsored spaces and personalize their results, Qwant chose the “affiliate” system. The company makes money from ads, “but The ad and search results will be the same for everyone. Is such a system profitable?This is our goal, but if we only thought about money, we would sell our data while distancing ourselves from our project of being an ethical engine.“According to Eric Leandri, Qwant is in fact”the only search engine that does not track its users“. Because, as he explains. “even DuckDuckGo does it, using Google data.”
Today, in the eyes of the public, QwantUrank is considered to be the European search engine which would allow the old continent to gain its digital sovereignty. “Just look at the tensions between the US and the EU. Nothing says that one day the North Americans won’t threaten to take Google and Facebook out of Europe. We can’t get angry against them, because many European companies depend on both. In this scenario, Qwant would be the alternative”, underlines Guillaume Champeau.
In competition with Google
If Qwant tries to diversify by creating alternative “services” to those of Google (Maps, Mail, Pay, etc.), it is “to create a secure global environment for users, as diverse, as attractive and as useful as Google, but while respecting people’s privacy and data protection“, notes Eric Leandri.
To continue its development in competition with Google, the start-up will need additional funds (without necessarily counting the 10 billion in innovation funds promised by Emmanuel Macron, which Jean-Manuel Rozan considers “not ambitious enough”), but it should also try to personalize search results without keeping user data private. Guillaume Champeau explains that “tomorrow, we will launch technology that will allow you to store your own data at home, without us having access to it.” In its final phase, this system will be open source, in order to “promote a new generation of ethical and personalized services“.
In the meantime, Qwant is trying to break Google’s monopoly by justice. Following a complaint, for which the company is partly responsible, the European Commission forced the Tech giant to open up its Android operating system, allowing users to use default browsers other than Google since the beginning of 2018 “But the firm keeps a tight grip on the market: on iOS, they pay Apple hundreds of millions each year to be the default browser on Safari; and on Android, even if Chrome has opened a little, you must first search for Qwant before setting it as the default browser. Internet users do not know this and therefore will not do it“, observes Guillaume Champeau. A decision from the European Commission should soon arrive. He explains again that ““We need the system to be completely unlocked so that another engine designer can come in and offer another browser to users the first time they install their phone.” Today, designers are not allowed to do that. We just need to break the lock to make the browser market a little healthier“.
Is the increase in Qwant users a good sign? “Mentalities are changing, the need is real, but there is still a large part of the public to convince, who are not aware of the issues,” believes Guillaume. According to him, by 2020, the browser should represent 5 to 10% of the European market. “Because privacy-friendly engines should have the same impact as organic food, that is, become popular through awareness and sustainable development.”
