En travel on the Old Continent, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, lectures Europe. Forget Moscow, the common enemy is now in Beijing. We hope that the president has not surfed too much on the French Internet. He would have learned there, following an article on the site Politico, that the French search engine Qwant, nicknamed the “European Google” and supported at arm’s length by France, Germany and the European Commission, had just won 8 million euros in funding from Huawei, Washington’s pet peeve.
The Chinese champion of telecoms equipment, which is spending a fortune on lobbying to restore its image in Europe, flies to the rescue of yet another disappointed hope. Of course, the very active septuagenarian Joe Biden will be able to display a patronizing air. That 8 million is not even two hours of Google’s bottom line.
And then Qwant, founded in 2013 on promises of respect for privacy and a certain independence from the Californian behemoths, is in fact in the hand of another titan, Microsoft. The latter provides nearly 60% of Qwant’s search results with its own engine, Bing. Moreover, it is also Microsoft which ensures the advertising network as well as a good part of the IT infrastructure of French. In matters of sovereignty, we could do better.
Public support
The initial idea was laudable, however: to free itself from the tutelage of an American tool which has built its hegemony and the efficiency of its service on the exploitation of the personal data of its users. And after all, the Korean Naver or the Russian Yandex have shown that you can succeed in making a local search engine thrive.
In addition, free software initiatives like DuckDuckGo have also found their way. But Qwant lacked the means to achieve its ambitions. Three years after its creation, in Seoul in 1999, Naver merged with a very popular gaming portal and went public, then launched into instant messaging.
Qwant, however, did not lack public support. The European Investment Bank, the Caisse des Dépôts, the German Axel Springer provided financial support. The French administration installed it by default on its computers. But, in 2013-2015, it was already too late in this highly capital-intensive specialty of Internet research with nascent technology and without a solid business model. In 2020, the company reduced its losses to 13 million euros, almost twice its turnover. To face the titans, you need strategy, resources and a good sense of timing. Not easy.