Qwant celebrated his 5th birthday … and he does not stop growing



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To celebrate its 5th anniversary, Qwant, the ethical search engine of Nice, has relooked its interface. Clearer, more structured, it offers increased readability.

It also has a new general manager in the person of François Messager, in charge of supporting the company in its organization and the transformation of its processes. working. All this adds to the string of new services announced a few weeks ago in Paris: Qwant Masq, Mail, Maps, Sports, Med & Surgery … which join Qwant Junior and Qwant Music. The goal being to create an ecosystem of complete.

acceleration

Even if it is far from worrying the ogre Google – a year of queries at Qwant corresponds to 6 to 10 days of requests from his American competitor – the Petit Poucet Nice has an appetite and wants to eat a bigger piece of the cake.
For now, it represents only 4 to 6% of market share in France (less than 2% in Germany and Italy and Spain) but Qwant is nevertheless accelerating: from 9.6 billion requests in 2017, it targets 20 billion this year.

3.5 million in 2017, its turnover is expected to reach 10 million this year. A nice leap, as well as its workforce which, following one hundred recruitments, has pbaded 164 employees spread over five sites in France. If the R & D remained in Nice, the head office is now in Paris in brand new premises. And Qwant also looks east, from China more precisely.

An alternative to the ecosystem Google

With this good news, Eric Léandri, its founder and also president of the French Tech Côte d'Azur, is touring these innovations that all have one thing in common: the protection of personal data. A sensitive subject Cambridge Analytica affair that has shaken Facebook.

Harvesting none of the data of its users, the browser turns its back on targeted advertising "which brings between 60 and 80 euros per year to Google, against 12 euros for us, explains the leader, but that is enough for us to live and to show that there is another model than that of Google. " Warning: there are ads on Qwant but their selection is based on the words entered by those who search the search engine

Qwant Masq which will be launched in a few days is a personal data management agent. It will allow users to have personalized services.

Where is the novelty? In the fact that he does not return to their private life. The personal data of the user are no longer stored in a server but on his smartphone.

"The best way to keep your private data is to keep them locally, proudly observes Eric Léandri. We wanted to implement this solution in 2015 but it was difficult to encrypt the data in real time without degrading the user experience and to synchronize them between the different devices of a person. "

The cartographic system Qwant Maps, whose beta version will be released in the fall, works on the same principle: personal and professional addresses and different locations will only be accessible to users.

Also available at the beginning of the year, non-intrusive and secure Qwant messaging Mail and the full payment system Qwant Pay "which guarantees secure payments and of course anonymized with its mobile phone e in the physical outlets, provides the CEO of the search engine. Nothing goes back into the cloud; all the information on the credit card is encrypted on the phone. "

The service will be available on Android at first and then later online.Free for the user, the bank will, for its part , pay back one euro per year and per user The first tests of Qwant Pay started in Corsica at the beginning of June

The news of all (e-) athletes …

Another new service: Qwant Sports, a search engine entirely dedicated to sports, aggregates all data related to different sports on the Web.

A "plus" that football fans appreciate during the World Cup. world because they have directly all the news of the matches: results, videos, photos, profiles of the players …

This declension comes to join Qwant Games dear to the e-sportsmen and they can thus find any what video game, follow the news e-sport, social networking and online play …

Help for surgeons

Is that all? No, there is still Qwant Med & Surgery that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality in the field of medicine. " The technology that makes it possible to transform an MRI into a 3D image has already been tested during an operation to remove fibroids from a patient." A world first " explains Eric Léandri who does not forget to quote Qwant Civil security, alerts and SMS prevention. It will be tested this summer in Corsica in the framework of marking of starts of fire.

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