[HN Gopher] French search firm Qwant seeks EUR8M Huawei bailout ...
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French search firm Qwant seeks EUR8M Huawei bailout loan
Author : ColinHayhurst
Score : 70 points
Date : 2021-06-15 10:17 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.eu)
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| Looks like a smart move to me. Borrow 8 million, bankruptcy the
| next day, and pocket it all. China can have all the remaining
| junk from the junk company.
| tchalla wrote:
| > The company lost EUR13 million in 2020, EUR23 million in 2019
| and EUR11.2 million in 2018 for revenues that amount respectively
| for EUR7.5 million, EUR5.8 million and EUR3 million.
|
| Pfft ... this seems to be peanuts for the Silicon Valley VCs out
| there.
| thepangolino wrote:
| They've got a terrible, terrible product. Not sure they would
| have received anything from a Silicon Valley VC.
| sekh60 wrote:
| Even Juicero raised money.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's not how it works. In SV they would have received
| 10fold the funding that they received in Europe. As a result,
| most likely they would have had a better product.
| tormeh wrote:
| Not so sure. Why compete with Google by trying to do
| exactly the same thing, but worse? It's a shitty business
| plan. Might even be too shit for SV.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > trying to do exactly the same thing, but worse
|
| You mean launching Google when we have Altavista?
|
| Launching FB when we have LiveJournal?
|
| (I mean at founding/initial version level, of course they
| became better than their competition, but that took time)
|
| The sad part about this is that $8Mi is peanuts.
| kmlx wrote:
| > You mean launching Google when we have Altavista?
|
| google was miles ahead of altavista.
|
| > Launching FB when we have LiveJournal
|
| FB was miles ahead of LiveJournal.
|
| ---
|
| a trend appears...
| raverbashing wrote:
| Not at their beginning they weren't. Google wasn't better
| than AV after their first investment.
|
| FB wasn't even public at first, but School/University
| only.
| Udik wrote:
| > backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and European
| Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Qwant was designed
| to become a rival to U.S. search giant Google and bolster the
| EU's tech sector
|
| How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket
| bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of
| wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's
| appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU.
| Really, it's cringe worth.
|
| The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride
| and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need
| to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an
| embarrassment of yourself.
|
| (European here, just in case someone takes this for some
| nationalistic rant from the US).
| ErrrNoMate wrote:
| They did copy SV, the product just sources results from Bing,
| like DuckDuckGo does.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous
| pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results,
| you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't
| make an embarrassment of yourself.
|
| This is also why there won't ever be a EU Silicon Valley. Paris
| isn't going to support any Europe-wide effort to create one
| that isn't located in the Hexagon, nor will Berlin support one
| that isn't somewhere in Germany. London pre-Brexit would not
| and did not support anything that might take away from Silicon
| Fen.
|
| While other US states encourage their own tech centers' growth,
| Floridians and New Yorkers and Texans are all aware of, benefit
| from, and are proud of Silicon Valley being in the US. This
| can't and won't happen in the EU unless and until people feel
| more strongly that they are EU citizens than of their own
| countries, and maybe not even then.
| tester756 wrote:
| The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous
| pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results,
| you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't
| make an embarrassment of yourself.
|
| did china copy SV to setup their comparable companies?
|
| tencent, alibaba, baidu
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Every word is correct. The EU has become an embarrassing
| buerocratic nightmare for anything related to tech.
|
| The EU needs to completely start over somehow.
| Popegaf wrote:
| Well, they didn't innovate. They didn't add anything new to
| searches nor can I find a real differentiator in the product.
| It's a "privacy search engine that uses bing... but French!".
|
| It's not federated, open-source and written in a fancy language
| like Rust, doesn't remunerate people in some special way (a
| crypto currency of some sort), doesn't have a groundbreaking
| browser-extension, there are no special integrations with any
| services, no new ways of filtering stuff (e.g a list of people
| who rate search results that you can subscribe to), just...
| there's nothing really attractive or catchy about it.
|
| They could've taken or forked Yacy (federated, opensource search
| engine), dumped those millions into it and made it a serious
| project, but alas
| drannex wrote:
| They don't use bing for the most part, they have their own
| crawlers and their results are far better than nearly any other
| competitor. I have been a happy user for the past two years.
|
| They use Bing for their ad network, and to sometimes (rarely)
| produce results when their own crawlers fail.
| baud147258 wrote:
| I remember trying Qwant a few years ago and I wasn't really happy
| with it, both for search results and UI/UX. Staying with a Google
| search alternative, I went with DuckDuckGo and didn't look back
| (especially with access to g! to easily search on Google if ddg
| fails to dig up what I want)
| mouldysammich wrote:
| Qwant does support !g etc if you end up needing it.
| alex_anglin wrote:
| Is there any reason to use Qwant over DDG, aside from a
| Francophone focus?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Not American and thus not subject to us intelligence
| surveillance.
| ciupicri wrote:
| Isn't it vice-versa? It's hard from a legal point of view
| to spy on one of your own, but it's easier to do it on a
| foreign entity?
|
| > During the 2013 NSA leaks Internet spying scandal, the
| surveillance agencies of the "Five Eyes" have been
| accused of intentionally spying on one another's citizens
| and willingly sharing the collected information with each
| other, allegedly circumventing laws preventing each
| agency from spying on its own citizens.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Controversy
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Yes. I was assuming an European perspective - also I
| don't think any European intelligence service have
| anywhere near the capabilities of the US ones.
| belatw wrote:
| They're begging to sell 5-7.5% of the compny for EUR8m?
|
| Sounds like it is time for Qwant to give up.
| conradfr wrote:
| It's all political and diversion of public funds (if that's the
| correct English term, I edited "money laundering" out).
|
| Qwant should be dead, it is said most of its index is served by
| Bing anyway (they used to hide it for years and lie about their
| own indexing stats).
| GordonS wrote:
| Can you substantiate these (seemingly bizarre) claims of
| money laundering?
| bleuarff wrote:
| France has invested a lot of money into this company. And
| it was approved to become the official search engine on
| many state administration's computers, even after an audit
| revealed the terrible quality of their product. Things are
| a bit shady around Qwant, and this is ground for all kind
| of suspicions (not that I'm endorsing any).
| GordonS wrote:
| That does not fit any definition of money laundering.
|
| It sounds more like decisions are being made based on
| politics, presumably with an eye to the long-term
| improvement and viability of Qwant.
| gabaix wrote:
| Neither 'diversion of public funds' (I believe you mean
| embezzlement) nor 'money laundering' would fit the
| description. This is more akin to 'poor use of public
| funds', which is also common in the US, and equally frown
| upon.
| eloisant wrote:
| I think the term he's looking for is Embezzlement of
| Public Funds indeed.
|
| It's not just "poor use of public funds", but illegal use
| of public funds. For example when a public institution
| picks a supplier in an illegal manner (i.e. picking a
| friend instead of respecting the process for a public
| contract, or using public funds for personal benefits).
| coliveira wrote:
| You mean like when US government gives billions of
| dollars to bankrupt companies? Maybe the French are
| getting cues from Washington.
| xNeil wrote:
| > Qwant should be dead, it is said most of its index is
| served by Bing anyway.
|
| Almost all search engines apart from Google use the Bing
| Index, including DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Excite, Lycos, and
| Yahoo! Search. [1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
| [deleted]
| ErrrNoMate wrote:
| This might be of use to you also:
| https://searchenginemap.com/
| coliveira wrote:
| What they call here a "bailout loan" is what Americans call next
| round of funding for tech companies.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We
| need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still
| another choice.
|
| The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled
| person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably,
| concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not
| untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-
| Springer board member; especially as they own the publisher. It
| might be a call for another more palatable, to them, savior.
|
| Their efforts to develop their own index would offer a real
| alternative and this is important for society and the economy.
| This article [0] dicusses those struggles saying "The technology
| developed worked super well on a few million indexed pages, but
| needed to be modified to operate on a larger scale,". Certainly
| building an index for billions of pages and which operates fast
| is a big challenge we had to get over. There are many choices to
| make when designing, developing and deploying each of the three
| elements of a crawler, index and ranking engine. And those
| choices lead to big differences in SERPs: differences that are
| very distinct compared with what is offered between a search
| "engine" company and any of their syndication partners.
|
| Self-disclosure: CEO of a search engine company
|
| [0] http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-
| goo...
| throwaway4good wrote:
| What is Huawei's strategy here? Other than they need a non US
| search engine for their European audience.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Maybe they're trying to compete with Baidu.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| They have a decent search engine in petal search:
|
| https://petalsearch.com
|
| This would be for a western european audience. I don't
| think you can get us to Baidu, however you can probably get
| us to use Qwant.
|
| So maybe it is the brand they are after.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| That might well be a main reason. Plus search options for
| HarmonyOS beyond Petal Search. But the article states the
| main aim IMO: "Financial backing could mean the Chinese
| player gains a say over the company's operations, at a time
| when Huawei stands accused by several governments of spying
| and has been pushed out of key markets."
| jacquesm wrote:
| For any sufficiently large Chinese company substitute
| 'China'.
| [deleted]
| julienreszka wrote:
| It's not an alternative, it's a substitute, an ersatz.
| dantondwa wrote:
| In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant
| a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing
| search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's
| UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an
| ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo
| has a very nice interface.
|
| I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have
| to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not
| sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet
| another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search
| (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results
| are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical
| things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me).
| Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise
| from it.
| abawany wrote:
| I've been using Qwant as my main search engine for 2 years at
| least and ime/imo the results were fine. When a given query
| didn't give the results I expected, I searched for the same in
| Google and often came away similarly disappointed. I'm sad to
| see that Qwant is struggling.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of
| course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their
| results are just Google slightly re-ordered.
| dantondwa wrote:
| Really? That's disappointing. Thanks for the heads up, I
| guess this explains why the results were good.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some
| minor noise?
|
| edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the
| results as similar to google, not that they're coming from
| google itself
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my
| observations.
|
| >edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the
| results as similar to google, not that they're coming from
| google itself
|
| I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have
| acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results
| from Google.
|
| If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about
| including Google results.
| gopi wrote:
| Is it legal to scrape search results and use it in a
| competitive product?. Is this a legal grey area or its
| settled in court?
| miav wrote:
| While Brave does turn many away with its built in
| cryptocurrency and its questionable userbase, it's a damn good
| browser. I switched from FF after the layoffs and in short it
| has better privacy, UX and feature set and all BAT
| functionality can be easily and completely disabled.
|
| It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are
| concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that
| a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think
| of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from
| scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I
| acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's
| dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be
| using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow
| down Google's plans.
| [deleted]
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