Qwant is a privacy focussed search engine based in Europe. It is a French company and employs about 60 people in France. It was started in 2013 and has slowly grown with a market share of less than 0.5%. It is a tiny competitor in a market of giants such as Google, Bing and Yahoo as well as a large range of smaller players such as DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Swisscows and the like. It has 6 million users per month and over 2 billion searches per year.
It was designed to give the French and Europeans an alternative to the large American search engines. In a world where the US dominates all aspects of the internet, from search and social media, to software and cloud servers, the Qwant team decided it was time for Europe to have their own search engine.
Qwant is based on 3 quality pillars - providing a quality internet search, providing a neutral search result, and placing the privacy of its users at the forefront of everything they do. It does not store any data about its users nor does it sell data to third parties or data brokers. As it is based in Europe it is covered under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights where data protection is a fundamental right.
Qwant specifies that it does not track users, nor resell personal data to data brokers. Also, very importantly, Qwant does not bias or skew the search results based upon your profile or data.
It has its own search index which it continues to develop but also sometimes uses other search APIs including Bing's API backend.
In some good news, Qwant has recently had a great business win. On 04 June 2026, the European Government announced that it was changing its default search engine from Google to Qwant, particularly around data and privacy concerns and relying on American companies for all things internet. This should leave Qwant with more users and more search queries on a daily basis.
This comes on the back of a range of French and European companies as well as an increasing number of French Government departments switching to Qwant and reducing the reliance upon Google and Bing..
They have also developed partnerships with Samsung, Huawei, Firefox, Mozilla and Brave.
One of their more important partnerships, has been with Ecosia. In 2025, they joined forces to develop the European Search Perspective in order to provide better European search results, that are based in Europe. It will focus on providing better French and German language search results. Qwant will provide the workforce and technology and Ecosia will provide the funding to run the Perspective.
In summary, Qwant is a very small but important European search engine. It is based in France and provides local jobs and revenue. More importantly, it is a privacy focussed search engine that protects user data and provides independent, unbiased search results.
Give them a try!
