Goodbye Google: European Parliament makes French rival Qwant its default search engine

[Redaktion]

The European Parliament is dropping Google for Qwant, a privacy-focused French search engine, as the default on MEPs' computers from June 4 — backing the EU's "digital sovereignty push", though Microsoft Office and other US dependencies are still very much in place.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Goodbye-Google-European-Parliament-makes-French-rival-Qwant-its-default-search-engine.1314384.0.html

[Trump]

Good job Trump. After China with Huawei, now Europe with GAFAM. Make America lonely again.

[Julian M]

Isn't/wasn't Qwant using Bing as its search backend tho?

Hopefully not anymore, as it would make this announcement a big joke.

[Burt L.]

What? being a french teatcher I should be delited by this news. Un fortunatly 10 students working on qwant in the same room is a total mess. Lags, feeling like beeing ddos from the same IP and stop answering for every one... Qwant (former using ms bing as motor) is far from being ready to compete...

[Julian M]

As of May 2024, Qwant was still using Bing according to Wikipedia reporting code audits and API tracing. They have been hiding their dependance on Bing APIs for years.

They acquired the French search engine Lilo in 2025 to sever ties to Bing apparently, so there's that.

[Worgarthe]

They have been hiding their dependance on Bing APIs for years.

Is that true, really? Because as far as I know they were pretty open about it always in their privacy policy: https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/

Do Ctrl+F for "Microsoft", there is 36 mentions. Such as:

"To provide relevant results when we do not have the answers to your queries ourselves, we have a partnership with Microsoft to provide our search results and contextual ads based on the entered keywords and your geographic region."

"Qwant recently launched a new search experience and partners with Microsoft to explore how you use and interact with our Services."

Including:

"Furthermore, regarding Bing search queries, Microsoft anonymizes stored queries by deleting the entire IP address after 6 months and cookie identifiers and other intersession identifiers used to identify a specific account or device after 18 months."

[Julian M]

So it's not so hidden, which makes it even worse for the French government to claim this deal with Qwant is about sovereignty then.

[Julian M]

*European, not French