Add Qwant as one of the search engines in the Tor Browser search bar

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Qwant is my search engine of choice in order to move away from Google and Duckduckgo.

I understand that Duckduckgo was chosen for its distance from the American tech sector and not so much for privacy and security, but as things have been in Europe for the past few years and things only getting worse I do not want to continue using Russian tech. Qwant seems like a decent alternative.

I understand that the Tor Browser already has an EU search engine, but Startpage received a large investment some time ago from System1 (owned entirely by Privacy One Group) an internet ad company. See here → System1 - Wikipedia , here → https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/5195077949204-Startpage-Founder-Robert-Beens-discusses-the-investment-from-Privacy-One-System1, and here → https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/5194985436948-What-is-Startpage-s-relationship-with-Privacy-One-System1-and-what-does-this-mean-for-my-privacy-protections.

Qwant on the other hand is fully European (France), is just as private as Startpage (probably), and is fully independent from the American and Russian tech sectors; even going as far as creating their own search index → Ecosia and Qwant join forces to develop European search index - Better Web .

Anyway, I’ll stop here. Please, feel free to look into Qwant further. My comments are by no means a proper report. I just think it’s worth looking into.

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And it’s not half bad. I use it now.

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I don’t think Duckduckgo quite distanced themselves from American tech companies (i.e. FAAMG). Though they appeared to be lashing out to Silicon Valley companies all the time, their servers are on Microsoft Azure. You can resolve the domain name duckduckgo.com and search the ip in bgp.tools , their service is on Microsoft Azure cloud.

Also can I learn why you mentioned “Russian tech”? Do you mean Yandex (which was not included in Tor browser’s search engine list)?

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I don’t like Qwant. A few years ago, Qwant started to replace the normal results about “sensitive topics” with the “official” answers from CCP if the user is in China, they might think doing this can prevent Qwant from getting blocked. In 2023, *.qwant.com got blocked in China as expected, the methods are DNS injection and SNI blocking.

People can search qwant.com on GFWatch or GFWeb too.

After it got blocked, Qwant even blocks Chinese IPs.

qwant-fs8
qwant-fs8539Ă—563 14.6 KB

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Last I looked into it (some years ago), Duckduckgo is partnered with Yandex. I do not know to what degree, but I’d rather not use it.

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Isn’t this standard for any company that wants to operate in China though? I don’t see it as disqualifying.

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Afaik they just used them for their search requests and even then they didn’t reveal user data. I don’t know if they “scraped” Yandex’s search pages or just proxied them, but in any case DuckDuckGo doesn’t use them anymore.

If you still want Qwant, then the easiest thing you can do is either bookmark it and open the bookmark using a keyword first, you can set it to the “home page” of your Tor Browser, or you can modify the Tor Browser source code for yourself.

I don’t know about adding it to one of the Tor Browser’s default search engines, but first of all DuckDuckGo has a pretty good privacy policy and second of all the reason as to why only 2-3 providers are included right now is most likely so you simply don’t get deanonymized while using Tor just because you used a non-default search engine option that a small amount of Tor users use. But I don’t understand why the “adding a custom search engine” feature is removed from the Tor Browser though.

Also aren’t their ads from Microsoft? (yes, it seems) DuckDuckGo just doesn’t personalize them.

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Qwant blocks most countries of the world, not only China.

Take a look of its availability map from Wikipedia page.

1280px-Pays_Qwant.svg.png
1280px-Pays_Qwant.svg.png1280Ă—555 113 KB

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Tested Qwant with Tor (security level: safer) and they blocked my access even after I finished their captcha.

Access blocked.
We detected unusual activity from your device or network.
Reasons may include:
Rapid taps or clicks
JavaScript disabled or not working
Automated (bot) activity on your network (IP [tor exit node IP])
Use of developer or inspection tools

Won’t recommend it to any person using Tor. :roll_eyes:
Also, Use of developer or inspection tools… what? :distorted_face:

So they’re spineless, suprise suprise :upside_down_face:

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