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European Parliament Ditches Google For French Search Firm (politico.eu) 38

Posted by BeauHD from the searching-for-sovereignty dept.
The European Parliament is replacing Google with French search engine Qwant as the default on in-house computers, citing digital sovereignty and privacy concerns. Politico reports: As of Thursday June 4, "Qwant will replace Google as default search engine on European Parliament computers," officials told lawmakers in an email seen by POLITICO. The change is being made "in line with the Parliament's commitment to digital sovereignty and the protection of users' personal data." The search-engine switch comes as Brussels doubles down on its push for tech sovereignty. The European Commission will on Wednesday unveil its long-awaited tech sovereignty package aimed at reducing dependence on foreign technology providers and boosting European alternatives.

The email described Qwant as a "privacy-focused European search engine" designed to avoid tracking users or collecting personal data. Founded in 2013, Qwant markets itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google. Searches conducted through the address bar in Firefox and Edge browsers will automatically be routed through Qwant, although lawmakers will remain free to use competing search engines or change their default settings.

European Parliament Ditches Google For French Search Firm More | Reply

European Parliament Ditches Google For French Search Firm

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  • Has anyone here done first-hand testing?

    • Re:Any good? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by higuita ( 129722 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @07:44PM (#66172260) Homepage

      Yes

      i use qwant for my main browser and startpage for the secondary one and sometimes try the duckduckgo in a third one

      qwant works fine, a little slower than google, but i imagine that the hardware that google have available is several times bigger than qwant may have.
      Results, for what i search (mostly tech related info) work well, don't miss google and if something do not show up, i try a different engine

      startpage, in the past it looks that most results are from google anyway and while it had zero ads, now it also have some too. It works fine

      duckduckgo, while i use this one less, it is also for some reasons, i like less the results, seems to return more sites that have some of the words but not all, making the results less useful

      So usually use all these engines and very rarely end use google, mostly by accident in browsers with new profiles or in other people computers

      Google right now is overrated, just like altavista got heavy, full of trash and got less useful results with time, google arrived and took them over with clean page and good results. I feel that google is in the same path, results work but the junk also, ads annoying and now AI... it is in the path of being replaced

      • Re:Any good? (Score:4)

        by JimMcc ( 31079 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @08:41PM (#66172338)

        I periodically try Duck, Duck, Go, and promptly revert to Brave. I'll try searching in DDG for the exact text of the title of an article, blog post, tech support post, etc., and it doesn't find it, even on major sites like MS. DDG always leaves me scratching my head, wondering what internet they're indexing. I'll give qwant a try and see how it fairs.

        • Yeah as a former DDG & Starpage user, Brave has been far sufficient for me for the past couple years, another vote here.

      • Sounds good - DDG is pretty bad lately, it typically just returns a list of AI generated SEO slop pages, so I've been switching back to Google in a private tab for a lot of things. Might be worth trying this one now!

    • At this point how could anyone do any worse?

  • "Le Goog" ?

    De'sole', pas de'sole'.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      "Le Goog" ?

      De'sole', pas de'sole'.

      Slashdot supports French accents strait with one single char only, here:
      Désolé, pas désolé.

      If your keyboard doesn't support French, you can even use html acute, circ and grave, hit reply to view the relevant codes:
      Désolé, pas désolé

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        "Slashdot supports French accents strait with one single char only,"

        Maybe you mean straight.

        strait (with no gh) refers to a narrow body of water (Hormuz is closed at the moment )

        Dire Straits used to make some pretty good music (is Mark Knopfler still alive?)

      • Testing:

        e' = é
        `a = à
        "o = ö
      • They broke support, for the username, maybe 20 years ago, my username was "Frédéric54" but after a slashcode update I was unable to log, I had to contact CmdrTaco to debug this and it was because they broke accented characters badly. Taco had to rename my username in the database...

  • Go to google.com and search for qwant (Score:5, Funny)

    by tom_asdf ( 8560347 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @06:43PM (#66172178)
    I went to google and searched for qwant, just to annoy google :)
  • Google never answers this right. Maybe Qwant will.

  • Not available in Japan.

  • It is nice to see diversity.
    Having single actors dominating a field is just too damn dangerous.

    Unfortunately it is hard to have competition and huge governments pushes like this are god-send to non prime players.

    So, yes, great job europe.

    Now, let us hope that they also support Mozilla.

    And that they will also help them by sending them some money...

    • This is a good point. Europe wants separation from the US. Why not fund open source projects? Everyone wins when this is done.

  • A lot of the tech titans CEO's were present and sucking up to Trump in the early days, no doubt hoping to gain some benefit from his influence.
    Now they must be kicking themselves. If this continues it will actually snowball. European governments moving away from US tech will probably be a financial hit in the $millions. But if flows on. Some employees will like the alternatives / get used to them and start using them at home, other companies that interact with the European governments will slowly swit

    • It's not just that - it's definitely part of the story but not the whole.

      GDPR puts a lot of responsibility on agencies to protect data, and one of those responsibilities relates to location of data. It has to be in a jurisdiction with proper protections and MS and Google have by and large been responsive by putting EU etc. datacentres in and locating EU etc. data within them. Everyone is aware that the US parent is subject to US legislation which typically overreaches national boundaries but the commercial

  • Excellent (Score:3)

    by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @04:56AM (#66172654)
    The world needs competition from non-us sources .

    Good to see they are dumping Windows/Office/etc too , so hopefully OSS will get a big boost. Then they can export that knowhow to the rest of the world.

    Let it be free of AI too (in this case AI is artificial insemination ), because it will mean you are right fucked if you have it.

  • Things that bother me at the results page are:
    - font size of text too large
    - left drawer sidebar wasting space
    - right "other searches" sidebar wasting space
    - not aware of browser window size, thus not fitting inside
    - sticky search bar
    - "to go further" section repeatign when displaying more results
    - dynamic search suggestions from search bar
    - add an "all languages" option to filter out unwanted local language results

    They could learn a thing or t

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